RaD Lab+Outside the Walls Fellowship Recipients Announced

A Black-led non-profit organization, Threewalls providing support and visibility for ALAANA (African, Latinx, Asian, Arab, Native American) contemporary visual artists in Chicago, today announced the 2020 recipients of the RaD Lab+Outside the Walls fellowship. The grants are $32,000 for 8 total projects. Nine fellows will be using their imagination for alternative ways showing racial equity through the lens of radical imagination and racial justice.

The fellowship is dedicated to the ALAANA artists that are working at the intersection of art, community, and justice and doing so to build a racially just society. The Surdna Foundation generously supports the fellowship. The foundation awarded Threewalls $1.2 million in 2019 to expand the organization’s racial justice work.

A year will be spent by the program fellows for researching, developing, and testing an idea that addresses a racial justice issue pertinent to their neighborhood community. The 2020 fellows are Jenna Anast, Ireashia Bennett, Aquil Charlton, Safiya Eshe Gyasi & Chineze Mogbo, Felicia Holman, Salvador Jimenez-Flores, Youree Kim and Chandra Christmas-Rouse.

They will be addressing a wide range of racial justice issues. Some of the issues included will be food apartheid, segregation, abolition, decriminalization of mentally disabled People of Color, and disinvestment from Black communities along with other issues as well. Community members based in Chicago neighborhoods will be engaged by each project.

Threewalls Executive Director Jeffreen M. Hayes says, “The artists and creatives we have awarded represent critical and imaginative thinking necessary to create a racially just Chicago, and by extension a racially just world.”