Announcing the 2025–2027 CARA Fellows
We are thrilled to announce our third cohort of CARA Fellows: Duwawisioma (Victor Masayesva Jr.) and Pippa Garner, who is honored in memoriam. The CARA Fellowship, one of our core programmatic initiatives, recognizes mid-to-late-career artists and artists' legacies across disciplines, uplifting knowledges and voices from different geographic contexts and making alternate historical perspectives visible. In recognition of sustained commitment to their practices and profound cultural impact, awardees receive unrestricted $75,000 grants and individually tailored support over a two-year term.
Both Duwawisioma (Victor Masayesva Jr.) and Pippa Garner, whose legacy is stewarded by her estate, were selected for the enduring influence of their unconventional experimentation across mediums. Working across writing, photography, and video, Duwawisioma is known for blurring the boundaries between documentary and experimental film through his use of abstract and poetic overlays. Foregrounding the lived experiences, traditions, and spiritual values of Indigenous nations, particularly the Hopi, his artistic practice provides forms of visual sovereignty and challenges colonial narratives by centering Indigenous perspectives and aesthetics. He uses technologies ranging from computer animation to experimental cinematography, and, in the process, reclaims them as tools of empowerment and resistance. He also maintains seasonal farming practices and looks after ceremonial responsibilities as the caretaker of the Dak Kiva, a traditional Hopi teaching space.
Similarly imaginative and genre-defying, Pippa Garner’s body of work spans classified ads, drawings, garments, custom cars, sculptures, tattoos, and performances. Throughout her five-plus decades of artmaking, she continuously examined American culture, identity, and consumerism, reimagining everyday objects to interrogate the contradictions and absurdities of societal norms. Born of an unending curiosity, her often humorous interventions––engaging with ideas about gender, autonomy, climate, fetish, technology, kink, and desire––revealed the potentials of art as an exercise in cultural critique.
The 2025-2027 CARA Fellowship recipients were selected following a thoughtful deliberation process. More than 50 nominations were received from a group of art workers, artists, and writers, including Carla Acevedo-Yates, Negar Azimi, Anthony Bogues, Coco Fusco, Sky Hopinka, Gean Moreno, Asma Naeem, María Elena Ortiz, Ebony G. Patterson, Joseph M. Pierce, Chelsea Spengemann, TK Smith, Namita G. Wiggers, and Claudia Zapata, among others.
Throughout the course of the two-year fellowship period, the CARA team works closely with fellows and those caring for their legacies to create and strengthen support structures. CARA takes a holistic, relational approach to this work, seeking to center artists' needs and desires through open dialogue and resource sharing. Support services vary depending on individual needs; past offerings have included archival assistance, debt counseling, legal advisory, connection to social services, and relationship building with scholars, curators, and institutions. This responsive way of working prioritizes process over a specific set of outcomes.
Current CARA Fellows include Valerie J. Maynard (2024–2026), whose legacy is stewarded by the Valerie J. Maynard Foundation, and Napoleon Jones-Henderson (2024–2026). Past recipients include E'wao Kagoshima (2023–2025) and Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (2023–2025), whose two-year engagements conclude this spring.
The CARA Fellowship was developed with support from United States Artists and is generously funded by the Karsh Family Foundation.