Winners of the 2020-2021 Working Artist Project are: Davion Alston, Kelly Taylor Mitchell, and Erin Jane Nelson

Davion Alston

Davion Alston received his BFA in studio art with a focus in Photography from Georgia State University. His work debates the conflation between object and subject with deft investigations of race, gender, sexuality, class, and performance. Alston has been featured online by websites such as VICE’s The Creators Project, New York Times, ArtsATL, and BURNAWAY. He is one of Atlanta Celebrates photography 2015 ‘Ones to Watch’ Recipient, a 2015 Idea Capital Grant Recipient, and a 2016 Anderson Ranch Scholar. He has exhibited locally in galleries and Museums such as Atlanta Photography Group, Hathaway Contemporary, and The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia to national levels such as the inaugural Queer exhibition at Yale University’s Green Gallery, Winston-Salem State University’s Diggs Gallery, Alfred University and Art Basel Miami Projects Gallery

Kelly Taylor Mitchell

Kelly Taylor Mitchell is an artist and educator who lives and works in Atlanta, GA where she is currently an Artist-in-Residence with the Studio Artist Program at The Atlanta Contemporary. Kelly is an Assistant Professor of Art and Visual Culture and the Art Program Director at Spelman College. Kelly’s multidisciplinary practice centers oral history and ancestral memory woven into the fabric of the Africana Diaspora, in order to present speculative futures, specifically related to concepts of community autonomy, swamp marronage, and inherited/constructed identity. Utilizing printmaking, papermaking, sculpture, and textiles her work manifests as immersive installations, performative objects, and partnered artists books offering a venue for the sensorial –specifically smell- to connect to, convey, and reimagine rituals and rites of autonomous kin, collectives, and individuals of the Africana Diaspora.

Erin Jane Nelson

Erin Jane Nelson is a native Atlantan who received her BFA from The Cooper Union in New York in 2011. Recent solo exhibitions include: כינהש (Shekinah), Chapter NY; Her Deepness at Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, and Psychopompopolis at DOCUMENT, Chicago. Her work has recently been featured in group exhibitions at La Galerie, centre d’art contemporain, Noisy-le-Sec, France; Deli Gallery, Brooklyn; Van Doren Waxter, New York; and Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich. Recent museum acquisitions of her work are currently included in Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950-2019 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Other.Worldly at the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands. She was named one of Forbes Magazine’s “30 Under 30” in Arts and Culture in 2019 and is a 2020 recipient of the Rabkin Award for Arts Journalism. In addition to her art practice, she is the Director of Burnaway.org.

Guest Curator, Marcela Guerrero

Marcela Guerrero on the experience as the 2020-2021 WAP Guest Curator: “Jurying this year's Working Artist Project further convinced me of the resiliency of art. Atlanta-based artists have shown that during these troubling times, ideas and creativity cannot be stifled. In fact, they understand the urgency and the social responsibility in harvesting an ecosystem that is critical of our present yet hopeful of a future crafted by their own hands.”

These three 2019-2020 winners bring the total to thirty-nine artists supported by the Working Artist Project.

About the Working Artist Project

MOCA GA’s Working Artist Project (WAP) was developed in support of established artists in the Metropolitan Atlanta area. Each year the program is funded by the Charles Loridans Foundation, the Antinori Foundation, the AEC Trust and the National Endowment for the Arts. Including the three Fellows announced today, there are a total of 39 Fellows over the past 13 years. As a museum that is dedicated first and foremost to supporting Georgia’s contemporary artists, it is MOCA GA’s goal to encourage these artists to remain in our city to establish Atlanta as one of the best cities for launching a viable career in the arts.

“This legacy initiative provides an unparalleled level of support for individual artists, expands the Museum’s mission, and promotes Atlanta as a city where artists can live, work, and thrive. MOCA GA supports artists by granting a major stipend to create new work; by presenting a solo exhibition of the new work; by producing an accompanying exhibition catalogue; and by providing paid studio apprentices over the course of one year,” —Annette Cone-Skelton, Director of MOCA GA

The Working Artist Project is supported by the Charles Loridans Foundation, the Antinori Foundation, the AEC Trust and the National Endowment for the Arts.