Kamau Patton and Steffani Jemison Receive Creative Capital Awards

Assistant Professor Kamau Patton (Visual and Critical Studies) and Steffani Jemison (MFA 2009) are recipients of the 2020 Creative Capital Awards. They are among the 41 artists chosen by Creative Capital as exemplars of the innovative, powerful, and challenging work that Creative Capital is dedicated to advancing. Each award includes $50,000 in project funding, supplemented by an additional $50,000 in career development services, for a total value of $100,000.

Inspired by a New York Times story from 1900 reporting that six “tramps” formed an acrobatic pyramid, cut a hole in the ceiling, and escaped from the Middlesex County Jail in New Jersey, Jemison's work, In Succession, considers the precarious and resistant figure of the acrobat. 

Patton's project Tel is a platform for performance, study, and contemplation that will question how the nature of memory has changed in relation to the encroachment of cyberspace, telematics, and transmission technologies. “Creative Capital [has] offered an opportunity to continue this work with an increased agency,” said Patton. “An increased freedom to define things in my own terms," says Patton to the Chicago Sun-Times.