Fifteen women of a certain age—including CalArts Art faculty Shirley Tse and alum Jen Liu (Art-IM MFA 01)—were recently named recipients of this year’s Anonymous Was A Woman grant. The unrestricted prize, which doubled this year from $25,000 to $50,000 per artist, is awarded to women who are 40 and older and at a critical juncture in their careers.
Hong Kong- and Los Angeles-based artist Tse works in sculpture, installation, photography, and text. Her bio notes that Tse “deconstructs our world of synthetic objects that carry paradoxical meanings and constructs different models in which differences might come together.” Tse’s works are part of the permanent collections of the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, the New Museum in New York, Vancouver Art Gallery, and Rhode Island School of Design Museum. In 2019, Tse represented Hong Kong at the Venice Biennale, presenting a solo exhibition of new site-specific works in the Hong Kong Pavilion.
Liu is a New York-based visual artist working in video, painting, performance, and sculpture “on diasporic Asian identities, postcolonial economies, techno-/bio-politics, and the re-motivating of archival artifacts.” Since 2016, she has been working on Pink Slime Caesar Shift (PSCS), a body of work that’s based on creating “alternative networks for labor activism through genetic engineering of food.” A recipient of several grants—including the Creative Capital Grant, LACMA Art + Technology Lab, and the Guggenheim Fellowship in Film/Video—Liu’s work has been featured at MoMA, The Whitney Museum, The New Museum, Kunsthaus Zurich; and multiple Berlinale exhibitions at AdK, Royal Academy and ICA in London, as well as in the 2015 Shanghai Biennial, 2019 Singapore Biennial, 2023 Future of Today Biennial (Beijing), and the 2023 Taipei Biennial.
Additional 2024 awardees are: Erica Baum, Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, Mary Lee Bendolph, Natalie Bookchin, Rashida Bumbray, Mary Ellen Carroll, Robin Hill, Joyce Kozloff, Gladys Nilsson, Liz Phillips, Liliana Porter, Takako Yamaguchi, and Constantina Zavitsanos.
The award started in 1996 in part to combat sexism in the art world and as a direct response to the decision by the National Endowment of the Arts to cease support of individual artists. In 2018, it was revealed that the award’s founder and funder was artist and photographer Susan Unterberg.
Two of this year’s awards were made possible by Fotene Demoulas, a Boston-based philanthropist who is a collector and patron of women artists; another anonymous donor also contributed funds toward an additional award. To date, Anonymous was a Woman has awarded over $6.5 million to more than 300 artists.
