The Chicago-based Joyce Foundation has announced the winners of its annual Joyce Awards, which recognize collaborations between Black, Indigenous, and people of color artists and organizations in the Great Lakes region.

This year, five awardees will each receive $75,000 to produce and present a commissioned work in collaboration with community members in Chicago, Cleveland, and Shafer, Minnesota, while exploring and strengthening connections between diverse communities, urban environments, and nature to imagine new forums for cultural exchange and assembly. Since 2004, the foundation has awarded more than $4.4 million to 82 artists of color in support of their community-based projects.

Grants were awarded to Regina Agu and the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), for a large-scale panoramic installation and field guide exploring community memory in Black Midwestern lakeside communities; Marisa Morán Jahn and the National Public Housing Museum (Chicago), for a permanent outdoor basketball court shared by the museum and a new mixed-income housing development; Sonny Mehta with Mandala South Asian Performing Arts (Chicago), for a music project that combines Qawwali, a devotional musical tradition rooted in Sufi Islam, with Gospel music; Marlena Myles with Franconia Sculpture Park (Shafer, Minnesota), for public artworks that restore Dakota stories, language, and art to the land using augmented reality that combines oral histories with geolocation and 3D animation; and Julie Tolentino and SPACES (Cleveland), which will develop an experimental performance installation to build connections within the LGBTQ+ community.

The awards were selected by an independent jury that included 2005 Joyce Award recipient Edgar Arceneaux, University of Texas at Austin art history professor C. Ondine Chavoya, Whitney Museum of American Art chief strategy officer Andrew Cone, 2015 Joyce Award recipient Sandra Delgado, Stanford University Institute for Diversity in the Arts lecturer and 2020 Joyce Award recipient Daniel Gray-Kontar, Pittsburgh Public Theater managing director Shaunda McDill, and Carnegie Museum of Art Richard Armstrong Curator of Contemporary Art Liz Park.

(Photo credit: Joyce Foundation/Spaces)