2022 Fellowship Exhibition:
Claudia Ruiz Gustafson and André Ramos-Woodard
December 9th, 2022 to January 29th, 2023
© André Ramos-Woodard (left), © Claudia Ruiz Gustafson (right)Each year, Houston Center for Photography selects an expert writer, critic, or curator to identify two artists from hundreds of submissions who exemplify excellence and innovation in their approaches to new photography. The Houston Center for Photography Fellowship and the Carol Crow Fellowship Awards aim to highlight each artist’s work and to offer them a platform and support to continue developing their projects. One Houston-based artist (residing within a 100-mile radius of Houston) receives the Carol Crow Memorial Fellowship and another artist, from anywhere in the world, receives the HCP Fellowship. The two selected artists are each awarded $3,000, an exhibition at HCP, and a spread in spot magazine. The competition is open to all photographic, film, video, and lens-based installation work.
HCP is pleased to exhibit the work of our Annual Fellows for 2022: Claudia Guiz Gustafson (Framingham, MA) and André Ramos-Woodard (Houston, TX). Gustafson is the HCP Fellow, and Ramos-Woodard is the Carol Crow Memorial Fellow. The 2022 Fellowship Awards were juried by Elizabeth Ferrer, Chief Curator at BRIC, a multi-disciplinary arts organization in Brooklyn, as well as a scholar of Latinx and Mexican photography.
HCP Fellow: Claudia Ruiz Gustafson
© Claudia Ruiz Gustafson “In La Ciudad en las Nubes, Claudia Ruiz Gustafson gathers photographic imagery, archival documents, and objects, to narrate a retelling of the story of Machu Picchu -- the Inca citadel that is as emblematic of the grandeur of Inca civilization as of 20th-century American cultural imperialism and appropriation. The first chapter of her project, Mi País Imaginado (My Imagined Country), takes up the now-discredited story of Yale historian Hiram Bingham’s 1911 “discovery” of the ancient site. In reality, local Indigenous people aware of the ruins and other explorers had encountered them earlier. But Bingham, armed with cameras provided by Kodak and funding from the National Geographic Society, was the first to document Machu Picchu and to conduct archaeological excavations there. The photographs he made (an astounding 12,000) and the artifacts he removed set into motion a legendary story of discovery that endures to this day. In her poetic evocation of this history, Ruiz Gustafson moves across time and space as she juxtaposes images of pristine landscapes with tourist advertisements, portraits of explorers with those of Andean laborers that they forced into service. Her reflections on Machu Picchu, at once personal and political, suggest how a colonialist narrative maintains a far-reaching grip over a people and a place.”
– Elizabeth Ferrer, Juror
Carol Crow Memorial Fellow: André Ramos-Woodard
© André Ramos-Woodard“Layering historic images of Blackness over his own photographs, André Ramos-Woodard confronts the blunt realities of a racist America. His focus is pop culture characters and cartoons, where degrading representations of African Americans have flourished for decades. The forms he appropriates from these realms can appear like unruly graffiti tags over the photographs, interlopers in Ramos-Woodard’s visualizations of self and community. But in taking ownership over these stereotyped renditions he performs acts of reclamation, upending them and considering their place in new narrations of contemporary Black life.
Ramos-Woodard aims to cause discomfort; he suggests that this offensive legacy must be confronted, not canceled. He does this, literally putting himself and other Black men in the picture and contesting the power racist caricatures once held. With these means, he instigates a provocative dialogue on the realities of Black experience, speaking simultaneously to pain and joy, anti-Blackness and proud self affirmation.”
– Elizabeth Ferrer, Juror
Opening Reception
Friday, December 9th, 2022
6:00 PM–8:00 PM
About the Artists: Claudia Ruiz Gustafson and André Ramos-Woodard
Claudia Ruiz Gustafson is a Peruvian Latinx visual artist based in Massachusetts. She holds a BA in Communications from Universidad de Lima. Her practice engages photography, collage, assemblage, poetry, and artist book making. Her work is mainly autobiographical and self-reflective; her cross-cultural experience and Peruvian heritage deeply inform her art-making.
Claudia has exhibited in museums and galleries across the US and abroad at venues including Danforth Art Museum, Griffin Museum of Photography, Newport Art Museum, Photographic Resource Center, Agora Gallery, The Print Center, and Galleria Valid Foto. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Centre for Photography at Woodstock. Claudia’s work has been published in Fraction Media, Black & White Magazine, F-Stop Magazine, Lenscratch, Artscope Magazine, The Boston Globe, among others.
Since 2019, she is the curator and participating artist of the traveling exhibition Crossing Cultures: Family, Memory and Displacement, a multi-media project made up of artwork created by multi-cultural artists reflecting on identity and diaspora.
Raised in the Southern states of Tennessee and Texas, André Ramos-Woodard is a contemporary artist who uses their work to emphasize the experiences of the underrepresented: celebrating the experience of marginalized peoples while accenting the repercussions of contemporary and historical discrimination. Working in a variety of media—including photography, text, and illustration—Ramos-Woodard creates collages that convey ideas of communal and personal identity, influenced by their direct experience with life as a queer African American. Focusing on Black liberation, queer justice, and the reality of mental health, Ramos-Woodard works to amplify repressed voices and bring power to the people.
A recipient of the Denis Roussel Fellowship from the Center for Fine Art Photography in 2019 and selected for Silver Eye’s 2021 Silver List, Ramos-Woodard has shown his work at various institutions across the United States, including the Tamarind Institute–Albuquerque, New Mexico, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston–Houston, Texas, Leon Gallery–Denver, Colorado, and FILTER Photo–Chicago, Illinois. He received his BFA from Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, and his MFA at The University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
About the Juror: Elizabeth Ferrer
Elizabeth Ferrer is Chief Curator at BRIC, a multi-disciplinary arts organization in Brooklyn, as well as a scholar of Latinx and Mexican photography. She has written extensively and curated exhibitions of Mexican modern and contemporary photography. Ferrer is author of Lola Alvarez Bravo (Aperture, NY), named a New York Times notable book of the year, as well as of numerous exhibition catalogs published in the United States and Mexico. Most recently, she authored the critically lauded Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History, published by the University of Washington Press in 2021. Ferrer has curated major exhibitions that have appeared at such institutions as the Smithsonian Institution, Notre Dame University, El Museo del Barrio, the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, and the Americas Society in New York, where she was Gallery Director for several years. She is currently curating a major retrospective exhibition on the work of Louis Carlos Bernal, a pioneering Chicano photographer, to be presented at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson in fall 2023. The exhibition catalog will be co-published by Aperture. Ferrer, who studied art history at Wellesley College and Columbia University, is originally from Los Angeles and is based in Brooklyn, New York, and in Western Massachusetts.
Through this annual call for entry, Houston Center for Photography (HCP) selects an expert writer, critic, or curator to identify two artists–one Houston-based and the other from anywhere on the globe–who exemplify excellence and innovation in their approaches to new photography and related media.
The Houston Center for Photography Fellowship and the Carol Crow Fellowship Awards aim to highlight each artist’s work and to offer them a platform and the support to continue developing their projects. The two selected artists will each be awarded $3,000, a solo-exhibition at HCP, and a spread in **spot magazine.
About the HCP Annual Fellowship Awards
** spot magazine is currently on hiatusQuestions?
For questions about this exhibition, please contact André Ramos-Woodard,
Exhibitions and Programs Coordinator, at andre@hcponline.org or 713-529-4755, ext 16.