2018–2019 Fellowship Recipients
Mira Almazrooei | London, England
Mireya Fabregas | Madrid, Spain
Vaughn Lewis | Berlin, Germany
Parker Limon | Cairo, Egypt
Natalia Oliveri | Jerusalem, Israel
Zhenni (Jane) Zhu | Campbellsville & Lexington, KY; Quartzsite, AZ
Projects
Mira Almazrooei
Mira Almazrooei traveled to London, England to document and create an archive of the spaces, buildings, and public institutions funded by the Sackler family. Her intent was to identify an image of cultural philanthropy by producing a material library and documenting the spaces at the epicenter of the Sackler’s exuberant funding strategies. The art funding system is and always has been rooted in imperialism—a space that protects a few individuals and leaves others painfully exposed.
Mireya Fábregas
Mireya Fábregas traveled to Madrid, Spain to visit several institutions such as the Instituto Geografico Nacional, Museo de las Américas, and the General Archive of the Indies at Seville, where she researched maps and cartography. Through exhibitions and primary documents she was able to understand maps as constructs that reflect the beliefs or ideology of the mapmaker, and to reconstruct her own maps of the city of Caracas.
Vaughn Lewis
Vaughn Lewis traveled to Berlin, Germany to visit the Neukölln neighborhood—where 21.1% of the population is of a foreign nationality—and the Tempelhofer Feld, a former airport that was converted to a park and is now an emergency refugee camp. His experience of the local culture and economy of Neukölln, and of Tempelhofer Feld’s scale, informed his design interventions at the former airfield.
Parker Limón
Parker Limón traveled to Cairo to document how ancient Egyptian monuments are managed, accessed, and restricted, both physically and financially. These artifacts are considered global patrimony and have been subject to a long history of violence, as evidenced by Cleopatra’s Needle in New York City and the proposal to repatriate it. After visiting 13 sites in Egypt, Parker expanded the scope of his project to include a study of the 21 remaining ancient obelisks in the world today.
Natalia Oliveri
Natalia Oliveri traveled to Jerusalem, Israel to investigate bias in the Old City’s preservation under the jurisdiction of UNESCO. Multiple sites outside the walls of the city were excluded at the time of its inscription on the World Heritage List, and fell under the protection of several Israeli organizations operating as settlement enterprises in East Jerusalem. Her investigation of the valley adjacent to the Eastern Wall and several archaeological sites at its peripheries revealed the use of preservation as a tool for erasing the Palestinian people and their narrative.
Zhenni Zhu
Zhenni Zhu traveled to RV campgrounds hosting employees of Amazon’s CamperForce Program in Campbellsville and Lexington, Kentucky, as well as Quartzsite, Arizona. After interviewing over twenty people at these campgrounds she better understood the reciprocal relationship between Amazon and CamperForce, allowing her to develop her thesis project as a fundamental challenge to our current work/life dynamics.
