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

Queer|Art’s first international grant provides an award of $10,000 for the winner and $1,250 for distinguished finalists, to support the creation of new work by emerging LGBTQ+ photographers. 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.

The grant was organized in partnership with The Robert Giard Foundation from 2020 until 2022 when the Foundation ceased operations. The Robert Giard Grant for Emerging LGBTQ+ Photographers supports and promotes self-taught, early career or otherwise emerging LGBTQ+ artists, awarded on a yearly basis. This support is vital for emerging artists, who may lack the financial resources or institutional support available to more established artists. The 2024 Robert Giard Grant for Emerging LGBTQ+ Photographers is made possible with the generous support of Joan Cadden, Glenn Stancroff, and the Robert Giard Foundation. After five years, 2024 will be Queer|Art’s final year hosting the Robert Giard Grant.

RIEL & BIANCA STURCHIO, 2024 WINNERS

Collaborative duo riel & Bianca Sturchio will receive the $10,000 cash grant to support the development of their series before the last lilac blooms, a fifteen-year photographic project that integrates the intimate world-building between queer non-normative twins. Through a mix of documentary and constructed images, they counter their experiences with illness and disease through immersive dream-like color. The Sturchios write, “before the last lilac blooms responds to our internalized interconnectedness from being mistaken for one another; we use photography to reimagine our separate and connected identities within our shared realities. Our photographs oscillate between reality and fantasy, creating another world by photographing the mundanity of everyday life, and documented and self-constructed scenes. Through rich color, ambiguously cropped images of the body, visual metaphors, and sincere portraits, we convey celebratory, challenging, and often invisible aspects of intimate sibling-hood and the world-building we share, imagine, and create.”

On receiving the 2024 Robert Giard Grant, the Sturchios reflect: “This award provides crucial support for producing our first solo exhibition in the Midwest, which will take place during Pride month. In a time where LGBTQ+ rights and women’s rights are increasingly under threat—nationally, but especially in Iowa—the opportunity to showcase this work feels particularly significant. Opportunities like this allow us to make the work that is most meaningful to us, and we are so grateful to receive resources and support from this year's jurors.”

Bianca Sturchio (she/her) is a social worker and mixed-media artist, holding both a Master of Social Work (MSW, 2020) and a Bachelor of Social Work (BSW, 2019) from the University of Southern Maine. Bianca explores the intersection of social work and photography, studying how art can serve as both a communicative and therapeutic tool in clinical and non-clinical settings.

riel Sturchio (they/she) uses their experiences as a queer, chronically ill artist to provoke, and criticize socially idealized normative fantasies of beauty, ability, and gender identity. They pair their academic background in critical queer phenomenology, bodily disorientation, and affect to explore the sculptural tactility of sound, the mediation of distance through varieties of touch, and the value of bodily awareness.

Grant judge Jess T. Dugan remarks: “I was very moved by Bianca and riel Sturchio’s series ‘before the last lilac blooms.’ Their collaborative project is sensitive, formally rigorous, and socially important. It was energizing to see a body of work engaging with queerness, family, and ability/disability, tenderly made from the lived experiences of the artists. I’m excited to watch as this project continues to evolve and make its way into the world.”

2024 ROBERT GIARD GRANT FINALISTS

2024 ROBERT GIARD GRANT JUDGES

Sarah Burke is the Editor-in-Chief of Them. Burke joined Them in 2021 from VICE where she served as an editor since 2017. There, as special projects editor, Burke helped develop multimedia collaboration across departments and lead multi-format projects including: The Gender Spectrum Collection, an award-winning stock photo library featuring trans and nonbinary models; Queerly Beloved, an Ellie-nominated podcast telling remarkable stories of chosen family; and Transnational, a Peabody and GLAAD award-winning docuseries about transgender rights around the world. She is a queer, mixed Pilipinx and was born and raised on O’ahu. She currently lives in Bed-Stuy with her partner and her cat, Miso. 

Jess T. Dugan (b. 1986, Biloxi, MS) is an artist and writer whose work explores the complexities of personhood, relationships, desire, love, and family. While their practice is centered around photography, it also includes writing, video, sound, drawing, and installation. Their work is informed by their own life experiences, including their identity as a queer and nonbinary person, and reflects a deep belief in the importance of representation and the transformative power of storytelling. Their work is regularly exhibited internationally and is in the permanent collections of over 60 museums. Their monographs include Look at me like you love me (MACK, 2022), To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults (Kehrer Verlag, 2018) and Every Breath We Drew (Daylight Books, 2015). They are the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, an ICP Infinity Award, and were selected by the Obama White House as an LGBT Artist Champion of Change. They currently live and work in St. Louis, MO.

Jacqueline Francis is the author of Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America (2012) and co-editor of Romare Bearden: American Modernist (2011) and Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage? (2023). Francis’s curatorial projects include Adia Millett: You Will Be Remembered (Galerie du Monde—Hong Kong; 2022), Fight and Flight: Crafting a Bay Area Life (Museum of Craft & Design—San Francisco; 2023), and Sargent Claude Johnson (Huntington Art Museum—San Marino, California; 2024). She is Dean of Humanities and Sciences at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

Tommy Kha (b. Memphis, TN) is a photographer/artist currently working between Brooklyn, New York and Memphis, Tennessee. He is the recipient of the Next Step Award, Foam Talent, Creator Labs Photo’ Fund, NYSCA/NYFA Photography Fellow, and most recently, a CPW Vision Award honoree. With a humorous and poignant touch, Kha examines how we construct belonging and otherness through photography, inventing new models for self-portraiture with a critical eye toward the medium’s long history of absences and erasure. He is a Wu Mei Kung Fu student under Sifu Ken Lo. Kha holds an MFA in Photography from Yale University. 

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 (2002-2022) 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, top to bottom: B. Dukes, Controlled Burn. Chen Xiangyun, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, 2021. Courtney Webster & Meg Turner, Domestic Bliss, 2018. Annie Flanagan, Alex at Queer Youth Prom, Alabama, 2018. Roberto Tondopó, Holy Name of San Sebastián, 2015-2017.