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      The Vilcek Foundation raises awareness of immigrant contributions in the United States and fosters appreciation of the arts and sciences.

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Home > Prizes > Prize Recipients > Carlos Motta

Carlos Motta

2017 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Fine Arts

Location

New York, NY

Title

Carlos Motta

Area(s) of Research

Fine art; photography; visual art; social justice; activism

Education

Whitney Museum of American Art (Independent Study Program); Bard College; School of Visual Arts

Country of Birth

Colombia

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activism artist colombia fine art photography social justice visual art
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Carlos Motta is pictured from the chest-up in front of a bookshelf full of books.

The first time Carlos Motta picked up a camera he was 15 years old, curious about his place in the world, seeking to understand how he might belong. He turned the camera on himself, performing for the camera and taking on characters in what he describes as a “personal process of self-discovery and gaining self-awareness.”

Born in Bogota, Colombia, Motta has continued to make art from that initial impulse to use tools to explore and inspect questions of identity, sexuality, and politics. Since moving to the United States in 1996, Motta has used his education at prominent arts institutions — the School of Visual Arts, Bard College, and the Whitney Independent Study Program — to become more intellectually sophisticated in his theorizing.

His interest in what shapes individual consciousness is at the center of his practice, and in the last 10 years has generated three distinct and important periods of his artwork.

The first is characterized by an interest in questions of representation and the experience of democracy, particularly in Latin America. This led to Motta’s second body of work, informed by his own experience of coming out as gay and reading queer theory, through which he began to fully investigate the emotional underpinnings of political awareness. Seeing that civil liberties were at times repressed by governing institutions on the basis of sexuality and gender led to his third body of work: questioning dominant accounts of history that seemed to him “incredibly biased and always told from perspectives that seemed to omit specific constituencies.”

Carlos Motta in profile is pictured chest-up sitting in front of a computer screen.

Motta believes the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise is a crucial recognition of his “sustained engagement with issues of community and reflecting upon the ways in which politics of marginalization and inclusion have affected communities.”

 

Awards and Accomplishments

  • Jury Prize, Map Digital Space, Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) (2010)
  • Future Generation Art Prize from the Pinchuk Art Centre
  • Guggenheim Fellowship (2008)
  • Next Exhibition Award, Real Art Ways (2006)
  • Rhodes Family Award for Exceptional Achievement in Photo (2001)

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2017 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Fine Arts

Iman Issa

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Iman Issa receives the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Fine Arts for exploring, through works of various media, difficult philosophical questions, such as the individual’s relationship to places, figures, and events that are collectively familiar, or the difference between experience and recognition.
Portrait of Iman Issa
2017 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Fine Arts

Meleko Mokgosi

Born in Botswana
Meleko Mokgosi receives the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Fine Arts for paintings that rely on intensive research, reflection, and conversation in order to address widespread misrepresentation of Africa and Africans, and to accurately portray the continent’s complex social and political realities.
Portrait of Meleko Mokgosi
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Nari Ward

Born in Jamaica
Nari Ward receives the Vilcek Prize in Fine Arts for a body of found-object assemblage artwork that invites both a public discourse and an intimate dialogue with viewers on topics such as race, poverty, immigration, and the Caribbean diaspora identity.
Portrait of Nari Ward

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