ICP Announces 2018 Documentary Arts Fellowship Recipient
ICP proudly names Abigail Montes the recipient of its 2018 Documentary Arts Fellowship, which awards $5,000 to assist a current Full-Time Program student with travel, equipment, and other expenses needed to complete a project exploring the evolution of an urban area.
Montes, a member of the 2018 Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism program, will build on her project My Beloved Bronx, which aims to create an inter-generational dialogue that illuminates the rich history of activism that rebuilt the Longwood/Hunts Point community in South Bronx—where the artist grew up—after a decade of arson in the 1970s. Through her black-and-white photos, Montes will document the rapid gentrification threatening to displace the current population, including small businesses primarily owned by people of color, in Longwood/Hunts Point.
The annual Documentary Arts Fellowship enables students in ICP’s Full-Time Programs—the ICP-Bard MFA program and the One-Year Certificate programs in General Studies in Photography, Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism, and New Media Narratives—to deepen their photography practice, while supporting Documentary Arts’ goal to present new perspectives on history and culture.
The fellowship is part of a significant partnership with Documentary Arts, a Dallas-based nonprofit organization, which also includes ICP’s major acquisition of African American vernacular photography, the 60,000-piece Texas African American Photography Archive, founded by Alan Govenar and Kaleta Doolin, the centerpiece of more than 100,000 photographs, films, videos, audio recordings, and new media works in the Documentary Arts Collection. In addition, it includes exhibitions drawn from the Documentary Art Collection, such as The Early Years of Rhythm and Blues: Photographs by Benny Joseph, on view at ICP’s gallery at Mana Contemporary in 2015.
The Documentary Arts Fellowship is supported in part by the Kaleta A. Doolin Foundation and the Communities Foundation of Texas.
About Documentary Arts
Founded in 1985 by Alan Govenar to present new perspectives on historical issues and diverse cultures, Documentary Arts, Inc. is a non-profit organization based in Dallas, Texas, and New York City. Documentary Arts’ collaborations with major institutions—including the National Endowment for the Arts, African American Museum (Dallas), FARO (Brussels), Maison des Cultures du Monde (Paris), and UNESCO (Nairobi)—have highlighted little-known practitioners of cultural forms via photography, films and videos, audio recordings, oral histories, exhibitions, public programs, new technologies, and collections of material culture.