Prof. Jennifer Pastor and two UCI Art Alumnae named 2020 Guggenheim Fellows

Jennifer Pastor, professor of art in the UCI Claire Trevor School of the Art’s department of art, is among the 175 writers, scholars, artists, and scientists awarded the 2020 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Guggenheim Fellowships. In addition, two UCI Art alumnae Rheim Alkadhi (M.F.A. ’99), a visual artist from Berlin, Germany, and Stacy Kranitz (M.F.A. ’14), a photographer from Smithville, Tennessee, have been named.

The fellows were appointed based on prior achievement and exceptional promise through a rigorous peer-review process. In the Foundation’s 96th competition, over 3,000 applicants came from 53 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 78 different academic institutions, 31 states and the District of Columbia, and 2 Canadian provinces.

Pastor is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work has been exhibited in national and international venues since the early nineties. She’s had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, with an upcoming exhibition at greengrassi, London. Her work has been included in the San Paulo Biennial, the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial and is in several permanent collections including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Professor Pastor will use the award to complete production on a large body of sculptures. To her, the sculpture resonates in unanticipated ways with the current COVID-19 quarantine, as it is about space emptied of events and bodies. The sculptures are comprised of the essential marks of the history of action in a space of extreme spectatorship. They are a type of mingled time-line, exteriorizing the spectatorship and the performance inside, incorporating carefully designed negative spaces to achieve a sculptural form that is mainly the thin skin of emptied space still in motion from the gestural marks of its history.

Created by Senator Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son, the Guggenheim Fellowship program remains a significant source of support for artists, scholars in the humanities and social sciences, and scientific researchers. With the naming of Pastor, Alkadhi, and Kranitz, UCI’s department of art now has 12 department faculty and alumni who have received the prestigious honor.

Guggenheim Fellows from UCI Art

2020
Rheim Alkadhi, M.F.A. ’99
Stacy Kranitz, M.F.A. ’14
Jennifer Pastor, professor of art

2019
Daniel Joseph Martinez, professor of art
Hồng-Ân Trương, M.F.A. ’08

2017
Ken Gonzalez-Day, M.F.A. ’95
James Luna ’77|

2015
Miles Coolidge, professor of art
Russell Crotty, M.F.A. ’80

2013
Kim Abeles, M.F.A. ’80

2008
Simon Leung, professor of art
Ruben Ochoa, MFA ’03

Click here to see full list of 2020 Guggenheim Fellows.
Click here to read full UCI press release.
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