Multidisciplinary artist Emilie Louise Gossiaux A'14 has been awarded the 2024 Ida Applebroog Grant from The Cooper Union School of Art. The biennial juried award recognizes an under-recognized artist whose work demonstrates high artistic merit while consistently challenging artistic conventions; recipients are granted $10,000 to support future projects.  

“The Ida Applebroog Grant will give me the resources to invest in the tools and materials that will help me grow, and advance my artistic practice,” says Gossiaux.

Gossiaux’s practice features works with drawings, sculptures, and installations that utilize a variety of materials such as papier-mâché, pen, and crayon. Gossiaux, who lost her sight in an accident when she was a Cooper Union undergraduate, uses her altered experience of the world to communicate new forms and languages. Her first solo-museum exhibition, Other-Worlding, at the Queens Museum, features London, her beloved guide dog, as she contemplates human relations with each other, different species, and the world around us.

“The Cooper Union is excited that thanks to the Ida Applebroog Grant we can continue to support our graduate Emilie Louise Gossiaux and her powerful artistic practice many years after she completed her studies in the School of Art,” says Adriana Farmiga A’96, Acting Dean of The Cooper Union School of Art. “Thank you to the nominators and review panelists for their work in selecting this year’s grantee.”

Gossiaux, who in addition to her B.F.A. from Cooper also holds a  M.F.A. in sculpture from Yale School of  Art, has won several awards including the John F. Kennedy Center’s VSA Prize for Excellence, a New York Foundation for the Arts Barbara and Carl Zydney Grant, the Jerome Foundation Fellowship Program for Emerging Artists at the Queens Museum, and The Pébéo Production Prize. Her work has also been shown at Tangled Art + Disability; MoCa Cleveland; Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt; The Aldrich Contemporary; MoMA PS 1; The Shed; and SculptureCenter, among others. Past solo shows include Significant Otherness at Mother Gallery Tribeca (2022); Memory of a Body at Mother Gallery Beacon (2020); and After Image at False Flag Gallery (2018). The New York Times, Art in America, The Paris Review, and The New Yorker are some of the many publications that have featured her and her work.

Named for artist Ida Applebroog whose work explored gender and sexual identity, politics, and violence, the Ida Applebroog Grant was originally issued by Exit Art. Following Exit Art’s close, The Cooper Union was asked to steward the biennial award which comes with an unrestricted $10,000 that can be used to assist in the development of the selected artist’s practice. This is the third grant issued by Cooper since Exit Art’s closure. The 2024 jury included curators Jenny Jaskey, Eileen Jeng Lynch, and Gabriela Rangel, as well as artists Pradeep Dalal and Mark Thomas Gibson A’02. Previous grantees include the artists Natalie Ball (2020) and Ginger Brooks Takahashi (2022).