SU’s Marien receives arts writers grant from Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

SU’s Marien receives arts writers grant from Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual ArtsMay 07, 2007Jaime Winne Alvarezjlwinne@syr.edu

Mary Lou Marien, fine arts professor in Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences, has been awarded an arts writers grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to support writing on contemporary visual art.

Marien, who also serves as faculty advisor for the visual arts for the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications’ Goldring Arts Journalism Program, will use the grant money to pen the article “Documentary Photography: Episodes in the History of Image-Making and Ideas.” Her article will reframe ideas on the intricate and often contradictory history of documentary photography through an analysis of photographic practice in the Cold War era (1950-75) and the period after Postmodernism (1990-2005).

Marien teaches art history and the history of art criticism. She is interested in the social history of art and the conjunctions of the various arts. Her courses include the study of art literature, contemporary art and photography, and issues related to ethnicity and gender. She has written extensively for the academic and arts presses. Her recent writings include the article “Charles Negre” in Singular Images (Tate Publications, 2006) and the second edition of her book “Photography: A Cultural History” (Prentice Hall, 2006).

Spearheaded by the Warhol Foundation as part of its broader arts writing initiative and administered by Creative Capital, arts writers grants are awarded on an annual basis in amounts ranging from $3,000 to $50,000. The three-year pilot program issues project-based grants directly to individual authors. Organizations are not eligible to apply.

The first of its type, the grants program was founded in recognition of both the financially precarious situation of arts writers and their indispensable contribution to a vital artistic culture. Through awards for books, articles and work in new and alternative media, the program aims to honor and encourage:

• writing about art that is rigorous, passionate, eloquent and precise;
• writing about art in which a keen engagement with the present is infused with an appreciation of the historical;
• writing about art that is neither afraid to take a stand nor content to deliver authoritative pronouncements, but seeks rather to pose questions and generate new possibilities for thinking, seeing and making;
• writing about art that is sensitive to both the importance and difficulty of situating aesthetic objects within their broader social and political contexts;
• writing about art that does not dilute or sidestep complex ideas but renders accessible their meaning and value; and
• writing about art that challenges creatively the limits of existing conventions, without valorizing novelty as an end in itself.