National Grant To Help USF Art Museum Exhibit 'Poor People's Art'

TAMPA, FL — The USF Contemporary Art Museum, part of the Institute for Research in Art in the University of South Florida College of The Arts, has been approved for a $50,000 Grants for Arts Projects award from the National Endowment for the Arts to support Poor People’s Art.

This project will present a social history of the experience of underrepresented and underserved communities in the U.S. since 1968. Individually and collectively, the artists included in Poor People’s Art tell a story of intersecting injustices of race, class, immigration status, health care systems, food insecurity and gender issues.

USFCAM’s project is among 1,125 projects across America totaling more than $26.6 million that were selected during this second round of Grants for Arts Projects fiscal year 2022 funding.

“The National Endowment for the Arts is proud to support arts and cultural organizations throughout the nation with these grants, including USF Contemporary Art Museum, providing opportunities for all of us to live artful lives,” said NEA Chairwoman Maria Rosario Jackson. “The arts contribute to our individual well-being, the well-being of our communities, and to our local economies. The arts are also crucial to helping us make sense of our circumstances from different perspectives as we emerge from the pandemic and plan for a shared new normal informed by our examined experience.”

In connection with the grants program, USFCAM will present an exhibit, "Poor People's Art: A Short Visual History of Poverty in the United States, January to March 2023.

Spanning more than 50 years, the exhibition will be presented in two parts: Resurrection (1968-1994) in the museum’s West Gallery, and Revival (1995-2022) in the East Gallery.

Resurrection includes paintings, photographs, films, sculptures, posters, books and ephemera made by a radically inclusive company of American artists, from Jill Freedman's photographs of Resurrection City, the tent enclave that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s followers erected on the National Mall in 1968, to John Ahearn’s plaster cast sculpture, "Luis Fuentes, South Bronx (1979)."

Revival offers contemporary engagement across a range of approaches, materials and points of view. It includes video from photographer Dawoud Bey from the 2013 “The Birmingham Project” as well the sculpture "Companion Species: Calling Back, Calling Forward (2021), Seneca Nation artist Marie Watt’s meditation on the collaborative nature of Native American culture.

Conceived in a declared opposition to poverty, racism, militarism, environmental destruction, health inequities and other interlocking injustices, this exhibition shows how artists in the U.S. have visualized poverty and its myriad knock-on effects since 1968.

Poor People’s Art is curated by Christian Viveros-Fauné, CAM curator-at-large, and supported in part by the award from the National Endowment for the Arts; the Stanton Storer Embrace the Arts Foundation; the Lee & Victor Leavengood Endowment; the USFCAM Art for Community Engagement Fund Patrons; and the Florida Department of State Division of Arts and Culture and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture.