Sharon Irish is a recipient of the 2014 The Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program. The program is designed to support writing about contemporary art, as well as to create a broader audience for arts writing, the program aims to strengthen the field as a whole and to ensure that critical writing remains a valued mode of engaging the visual arts.
In its 2014 cycle, the Arts Writers Grant Program has awarded a total of $600,000 to twenty writers. Ranging from $6,000 to $50,000 in four categories—articles, blogs, books and short-form writing—these grants support projects addressing both general and specialized art audiences, from scholarly studies to self-published blogs.
Irish’s project Stephen Willats in the Yew Kay examines the artist’s practice from 1970 to 2012, which investigated roles of audience, social location, and mass media in European cities. Social movements, second-order cybernetics, systems and information theory, conceptual art, and punk aesthetics all shaped Willats’ art, which in turn inspired current social practice art. He used film, collage, drawing, painting, sculpture, performance, and situations to explore human interactions as well as interconnections in urban spaces and with machines.
About Irish:
Sharon Irish is an art and architectural historian and adjunct lecturer at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her most recent book is Suzanne Lacy: Spaces Between (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). She has lectured in the United States, Canada, Europe, and India, and has taught library and information science, and architecture and art history at the University of Illinois. Her previous publications include a book-length bibliography on medievalism in North American art and architecture, a monograph on the architect Cass Gilbert (Monacelli Press, 1999), a number of articles and book chapters on Gilbert, and essays on artists Anish Kapoor, Suzanne Lacy, Nek Chand Saini, Le Corbusier, and Stephen Willats.
