The CARA Fellowship aims to nurture artists across disciplines, uplifting knowledges and voices from different geographic contexts and making alternate historical perspectives visible. The Fellowship provides recipients with unrestricted $75,000 grants in addition to individually tailored support over a two-year term. This approach aims to imagine holistic care for artists and their practices and prioritizes process and exploration, rather than a specific set of outcomes. Awarded artists decide how best to use the funds to nurture their life and work in conversation with the CARA team to create sustainable frameworks for their practices.
The fellowship–in dialogue with CARA’s other initiatives–is informed by CARA’s guiding question, which draws from the thinking of Yanomami philosopher Davi Kopenawa: How can we dream not only about ourselves? Inspired by this question, CARA’s exhibitions, publications, and public programs form an ecology of research in material, intangible, and embodied practices.
2024-2026 Fellows
Napoleon Jones-Henderson
Napoleon Jones-Henderson (b. 1943, Chicago, Illinois, lives and works in Roxbury, Massachusetts) is a renowned artist known for his long-term commitment to cultural representation and community engagement. A key figure in AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists), founded in 1968, as well as other intergenerational networks of Black artists, his work creates images inspired by the lived experiences and cultures of communities in the African diaspora. Often using the medium of public art, Jones-Henderson’s work is rooted in a desire for community connection through what he calls “visual music,” a rhapsody of colors, materials, and symbols. Beyond his artistic creations, he has been an influential educator and mentor, holding various academic positions and engaging in community-building through art. Jones-Henderson’s work has been shown at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the 58th Venice Biennale, and a 50-year retrospective at ICA Boston, among others. The support of CARA’s Fellowship will allow for the continuation of Jones-Henderson’s practice through the multimedia expansion of his ongoing series Requiem for Our Ancestors and the creation of portraits of his family, which he calls a visual memoir.
Valerie J. Maynard
Valerie J. Maynard (b. 1937 in Harlem, New York, d. 2022, Baltimore, MD) was a prolific sculptor, printmaker, designer, and educator. She has been internationally renowned for an artistic practice centered on Black resistance to social injustice, the beauty of Black life in spite of those injustices and the impact of ancestral memory on the descendants of enslaved Africans. Her work has been featured in prominent collections including the Brooklyn Museum, the Library of Congress, and a retrospective at the Baltimore Museum of Art, among others. Since Maynard’s passing in 2022 her legacy has been stewarded by the Valerie J. Maynard Foundation, a non-profit trust intentionally established by the artist, composed of her collaborators, friends, and fellow artists. The mission of the Valerie J. Maynard Foundation is to sustain, expand, and preserve the legacy of Valerie J. Maynard, her art, and her impact on a global scale, while also nurturing the next generation of Black women artists through residencies, arts education initiatives, and convenings that serve to contextualize and illuminate Maynard’s work and philosophy. The Fellowship will support the sustainability of the Foundation’s critical work, “making the world possible” for future generations, as Maynard’s dear friend Alexis De Veaux said Maynard once did for her.
2023-2025 Fellows
E'wao “Rocky” Kagoshima
E'wao “Rocky” Kagoshima is a Japanese-born, New York-based artist, whose practice encompasses painting, sculpture, and collage inspired by surrealism, pop art, abstraction, and postmodern playfulness. His work was recently presented at MoMA PS1: Greater New York, and it has also been featured in exhibitions at the Sculpture Center in New York City; the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania; the Jewish Museum in New York City; and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, UK. Some of his solo exhibitions have taken place at the New Museum in New York City; Nagai Gallery in Tokyo, Japan; The Box in Los Angeles, California; Greenspon Gallery in New York City; Mitchell Algus Gallery in New York City; and Galerie Gregor Staiger in Zurich, Switzerland.
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz is an artist whose expanded moving image work is entangled with Boalian theater, expanded cinema and feminist practices. She tends to work with non-actors, and incorporates improvisation into her process. Her recent work is on the sensorial unconscious of anti-colonial movements, translation, and feminist experiments with language and narrative. She lives in San Juan. Recent solo exhibitions include: Oriana in PIVO, Sao Paulo, and Argos in Brussels, the 34th Sao Paulo Biennial, the Momenta Biennale in Montreal; Her work is part of public and private collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, Kadist and Guggenheim. She has been awarded a Creative Capital grant, a USA Fellowship, a Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, an Anonymous was a Woman award and the 2021 Artes Mundi Prize, shared among all 7 nominees.
The CARA Fellowship was designed with support from United States Artists and is generously funded by the Karsh Family Foundation. CARA Fellows are by invitation only and fellows are invited to be part of this program supporting the curatorial vision.