The New York City-based Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) has announced Japanese American artist E’wao “Rocky” Kagoshima and Puerto Rican filmmaker Beatriz Santiago Muñoz as the inaugural recipients of the CARA Fellowship.

Designed with support from United States Artists and funded by the Karsh Family Foundation, the fellowship is aimed at supporting and sustaining mid-to-late-career artists across disciplines, uplifting knowledges and voices from different geographic contexts, and making alternate historical perspectives visible. The fellows will receive unrestricted grants of $75,000 in addition to individually tailored support over a two-year term. In conversation with the CARA team, the artists will decide how best to use the funds to nurture their life and work and create sustainable frameworks for their practices.

As an artist working primarily in moving images, Santiago Muñoz’s practice is informed by long periods of contact, observation, and documentation of place, inviting non-actors as co-creators in a combination of proposed structures and improvisations. Kagoshima draws from daily discoveries—extensions of his lived reality and interactions with strangers—as material for his sculpture, painting, and collage-based works.

(Photo credits: Image of E'wao Kagoshima: Noel Woodford. Courtesy of MoMA PS1, New York. Image of Beatriz Santiago Muñoz: Courtesy of Museo Amparo.)