The Robert Giard Grant for Emerging LGBTQ+ Photographers supports the creation of work by emerging LGBTQ+ photographers whose projects address issues of sexuality, gender, or LGBTQ+ identity.

ABOUT

In partnership with The Robert Giard Foundation, Queer|Art’s first international grant of $10,000 supports the creation of work by emerging LGBTQ+ photographers. The Robert Giard Grant for Emerging LGBTQ+ Photographers is made possible entirely through support provided by The Robert Giard Foundation.

Previously known as The Robert Giard Fellowship (2008-2018), the grant is named in honor of photographer Robert Giard (1939-2002), a portrait, landscape, and figure photographer whose work focused on LGBTQ+ lives and issues. The grant focuses on supporting emerging LGBTQ+ photographers whose projects address issues of sexuality, gender, or LGBTQ+ identity. This year, the grant winner will receive $10,000, and the first-runner up will receive $5,000.

Funds can be requested to support new or ongoing work at any stage of development. For questions, email Robert Giard Grant Manager Ka-Man Tse at ktse@queer-art.org.

CHEN XIANGYUN, 2022 WINNER

Chen Xiangyun will receive a $10,000 cash grant to support the development of her body of work which documents first and second-generation QTPOC immigrants across the United States. The work renders images of queer intimacy and vulnerability, especially among people of color, through authentic visual representations of their worlds. While photographing, the artist interviewed each sitter and asked about how their cultural backgrounds informed their experiences of being queer in America. Xiangyun’s ongoing series depicts people of diverse ethnicities, queer identities and regions, charting the emotional intricacies of queer life.

On receiving the 2022 Robert Giard Grant, Xiangyun writes, "I’m very honored to receive the Robert Giard Grant and I can’t wait to begin traveling the country to meet and photograph more queer people of color. It is my goal to increase queer visibility, portray the richness and complexity of our emotional experience, and reach more diverse ethnicities. As a Chinese lesbian immigrant and emerging photographic storyteller, this grant is an exciting opportunity for me to realize my ideas and grow my LGBTQ+ and art communities. I am very grateful for this award."

Chen Xiangyun is a Chinese lesbian photographer living in Brooklyn, New York. Her art practice employs bookmaking, analog film and photographs. Her work is rooted from her sexuality and Chinese upbringing. Chen has shown her work both nationally and internationally, including the Pingyao International Photography Festival in China, Baxter Street Camera Club of New York, Anthology Film Archives as well as Experimental Film Fest.

Grant Judge and multidisciplinary artist and educator Lorena Molina writes: “I really was drawn by the tension between the intimacy and distance in Xiangyun's portraits. As well as the strong push and pull between coldness and warmness in the work, which I think is realistic in any intimate relationship. Also, the people photographed seem in strong collaboration with Xiangyun, and Xiangyun is in charge of how much they share that special moment with the viewer. I'm really excited to see the project proposed for the Robert Giard Foundation Grant and to learn more about their stories.”

CAMILO GODOY, 2022 RUNNER-UP

Camilo Godoy will receive a $5,000 cash grant to support his long-term project AMIGXS, a series of assertive photographs of friends and lovers engaged in acts of love and lust. The project is inspired by 20th century queer photography and publishing legacies sustained by erotic publications like Physique Pictorial and Sierra Domino. Through AMIGXS, Godoy manipulates scale to toy with the boundaries between the private and the public – presentations of each photograph range from zine to billboard. Ultimately, the photographs in AMIGXS celebrate friendship and insist on love as a way of life to imagine subversive ways of being.

Godoy writes, "support for queer artists is fundamental to resist the ongoing catastrophic and conservative moment impacting us. Receiving this funding from the Robert Giard Foundation is an affirmation of my work. It is also a celebration of my relationship, and the people in my photographs, to the wonderful queer legacy of Robert Giard and of the many artists he photographed."

Camilo Godoy is an artist and educator born in Bogotá and based in New York. He has participated in residencies at Movement Research, International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), coleção moraes-barbosa, Recess, New Dance Alliance, among others. Godoy's work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, Leslie-Lohman Museum, CUE, OCDChinatown, PROXYCO Gallery, New York; Moody Center, Houston; UNSW Galleries, Sydney; Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Quito; among others. He has performed at Danspace Project, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Center for Performance Research, New York; Toronto Biennial; and Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt.

Grant judge and photographer, curator, and editor Jennie Ricketts says of Godoy’s work: “Camilo’s AMIGXS is a celebration of friendship, love, lust using black and white photography to assert subversive ways of being, reflecting classical form and scale, which on the page creates a dialogue between contemporary zine and billboard formats.”

2022 ROBERT GIARD GRANT FINALISTS

2022 ROBERT GIARD GRANT JUDGES

Jacqueline Francis is an art historian, curator, and occasional artist. She is the author of Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America (2012) and co-editor of Romare Bearden: American Modernist (2011). She is co-Executive Editor of Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art and a co-founder of the Association for Critical Race Art History. Her curatorial projects include “side by side|in the world” (2019, San Francisco Art Commission). A member of the Three Point Nine Art Collective, she exhibited the video RUN in the group’s exhibition at Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art in June 2021.

Naima Green is an artist, photographer, and educator from New York. Her practice is an invitation to participate, observe, and consider safety, utopia, and intimacy. Her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions, including at Fotografiska New York, Smart Museum of Art, MASS MoCA, International Center of Photography, Houston Center for Photography, Bronx Museum, BRIC, Gallery 102, Gracie Mansion Conservancy, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Arsenal Gallery, amongst others. Her works are in the collections of Barnard College Library, Decker Library at MICA, Fleet Library at RISD, ICP Library, Leslie-Lohman Museum, MoMA Library, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: Hirsch Library, National Gallery of Art, Olin Library, Cornell University, Smart Museum of Art, and Teachers College, Columbia University.

Sunil Gupta (b. New Delhi 1953) MA (RCA) PhD (Westminster) lives in London and has been involved with independent photography as a critical practice for many years focusing on race, migration and queer issues. A retrospective was shown at The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2020/21) and will move to Ryerson Image Center, Toronto 2022. He is a Professorial Fellow at UCA, Farnham. His latest book is “London 1982” Stanley Barker 2021 and his current exhibitions include; “The New Pre-Raphaelites” the the Holburne Museum, Bath. His work is in many public collections including; Tokyo Museum of Photography, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Royal Ontario Museum, Tate and the Museum of Modern Art. His work is represented by Hales Gallery (New York, London), Stephen Bulger Gallery (Toronto) and Vadehra Art Gallery (New Delhi).

Lorena Molina is a Salvadoran multidisciplinary artist and educator. She is an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Cincinnati. Through the use of photography, video, performance and installation, she explores identity, intimacy, pain, and how we witness the pain of others. She received her Master of Fine Art degree from the University of Minnesota in 2015 and her Bachelor of Fine Art from California State University, Fullerton, in 2012. She is part of the upcoming traveling exhibition, The Regional at the Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati, and Kemper Contemporary Art Museum.

Jennie Ricketts is an independent photography editor, curator, consultant and mentor. For 17 of those years she was a picture researcher and then picture editor at The Observer Magazine, commissioning and editing photography which attracted international recognition and widespread publication. She launched the Jennie Ricketts Gallery in Brighton in 2006 while writing and lecturing and now operates from County Wicklow, Ireland as an online space representing international photographers. She is currently a Trustee for Autograph ABP, The Martin Parr Foundation and a member of the Advisory Board for PhotoIreland, Dublin.

ABOUT ROBERT GIARD

Robert Giard (1939-2002) was a portrait, landscape, and figure photographer who came to the practice of photography relatively late in life. In 1972 he began to take photographs, concentrating on landscapes of the South Fork of Long Island, portraits of friends, many of them artists and writers in the region, and the nude figure. He is best known for photographing over 500 LGBTQ+ writers and activists. A selection from this project, Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers, was published in 1997 by MIT Press and led to a groundbreaking exhibit at the New York Public Library the following year.

In 1985, after seeing a performance of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, as the AIDS crisis raged, Giard decided to turn his camera towards the LGBTQ+ literary community to preserve a record of queer lives and histories. He began documenting LGBTQ+ literary figures, both established and emerging, in a series of unadorned, yet sometimes witty and playful portraits that would eventually number over 500 by the time of his death.

Giard’s work can be found in the collections of The Brooklyn Museum, the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, the San Francisco Public Library, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; his complete archive, including work books and ephemera, can be found in the American Collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

ABOUT THE ROBERT GIARD FOUNDATION

The Robert Giard Foundation was formed in 2002 to preserve Robert Giard’s photographic legacy and to make the full range of his work accessible to a wide audience. The Foundation promotes the use of Giard’s work for educational purposes and supports public programs and continued scholarship focusing on queer literature in America and LGBTIQ+ cultural and political movements. The Foundation also arranges for the permanent preservation of Giard’s photographs, writing and ephemera in museums, libraries, and other cultural institutions. Through the Robert Giard Grant for Emerging Photographers, the Foundation extends Giard’s legacy by encouraging current and future generations to document, depict, and interrogate past and present LGBTIQ+ cultures. The grant was first established in 2008 in cooperation with the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

ARCHIVE

Left to right: Courtney Webster and Meg Turner, Domestic Bliss, 2018. Robert Giard Grant Recipients 2021. Annie Flanagan, Alex at Queer Youth Prom, Alabama, 2018. Robert Giard Grant Recipient, 2020; Roberto Tondopó, Holy Name of San Sebastián, 2015-2017. Robert Giard Grant Recipient, 2019.