Current and Past Fellows

Robert Gardner Fellowship Recipients
 

2023      Munem Wasif (Dhaka, Bangladesh) is a photographer, mixed media artist, curator, and teacher. He will use his non-residential fellowship to work on Nil (নীল) (the Sanskrit for “indigo”), a photographic, archival, and mixed-media project he describes as a “layered narrative about the critical history of indigo in Bengal.”

2022      Lee Kai Chung (Hong Kong, China) will use the fellowship to work on The Infinite Train, an ongoing research-based art and archive project exploring identity and mobility in Dongbei—"northeast" in Chinese— or the Manchurian belt, at the junction of Russia, Inner Mongolia, the Korean Peninsula, and Mainland China. In creating The Infinite Train Lee will employ the journey as a creative research method, riding the railroad throughout the Manchurian belt. He will photograph people who are leaving the areas as well as those who insist on staying behind in these desolate landscapes.

2021      Wendel White (United States). White is working on Manifest: Thirteen Colonies, an ongoing photographic project of African American material culture housed in both public and private collections throughout New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.

2020     Joana Choumali (Cote d’Ivoire). Choumali is creating Yougou-Yougou (Secondhand Clothing), a photographic and mixed-media project exploring how imported western clothing affects community identity and exposes inequalities created by colonial legacies, transnational trade, and global power relations.
 
2019    Azadeh Akhlaghi (Iran). Akhlaghi is completing post-production of images, documentation, and research for The Vicious Circle, a project that explores eleven pivotal incidents in Iran that took place from the time of the Constitutional Revolution of 1908 to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The result will be a manuscript for a book that combines photographs of detailed event stagings with archival images, historical documents, and eyewitness interviews.

2018    Zhang Xiao (China).  Zhang's project expands on earlier work in Shanxi that focused on individual performers in shehuo, the annual spring festival, documenting the disconnect between the actors’ contemporary lives and the ancient traditions. Zhang is now revisiting the festival to examine another aspect: its current shift from traditional meanings and representations to kitsch entertainment and mass consumption.
 
2017    Sammy Baloji (Democratic Republic of Congo).  Baloji’s project juxtaposes views of architecture, industrial ruins, and giant anthills with portraits of the people—workers, villagers, urbanites, and the Gendarmes Katangais, a rebel resistance group—in the copper-rich Katanga province of DRC. His work is a visual exploration of place-based themes of identity, post-colonialism, social history, and memory.
 
2016   Ilana  Boltvinik and  Rodrigo Viñas of TRES  Art  Collective  (Mexico). Boltvinik and Viñas are developing the second phase of their project Ubiquitous Trash, an art-based research series on beach waste. The project began in Hong Kong in 2015; fellowship funding took it to the beaches of Western Australia. Drawing on the disciplines of biology, archaeology, economics, and anthropology, the artists’ work created a complex understanding of material waste and its circulation around the globe.

2015   Deborah Luster (United States). Luster is investigating violence, place, and the penal system, with a focus on Louisiana's Angola Prison. The site of the prison has witnessed slavery, Civil War, Reconstruction, Black Codes, convict leasing, Jim Crow, the Trustee System, segregation, mass incarceration, and now the COVID-19 crisis.

2014   Chloe Dewe Mathews (United Kingdom). Dewe Mathews continued a five-year project documenting the lives of people who live on the shores of the Caspian Sea in Russia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan, examining their relationship to these resource-rich and contested lands. Her book, Caspian: The Elements, was published by the Peabody Museum Press and Aperture (2018). The volume was awarded Best in Category (Illustrated Books) at the 2019 New England Book Show and First Place in Books from the American Alliance of Museums. An exhibition of her work is currently on view at the Peabody Museum.2013   Yto Barrada (Morocco/France). Barrada's project, titled A Hole Is to Dig, engages the complex terrain of paleontology in her native Morocco. She explores her topic from multiple human perspectives: those of scientists, museums, and cultural heritage professionals, as well as those of collectors, plunderers, and forgers of fossils. 

2013 Yto Barrada (Morocco/France). Barrada's project, titled A Hole Is to Dig, engages the complex terrain of paleontology in her native Morocco. She explores her topic from multiple human perspectives: those of scientists, museums, and cultural heritage professionals, as well as those of collectors, plunderers, and forgers of fossils.

2011   Miki Kratsman (Israel). Kratsman continued his long-term creation of a vast portfolio of photographs that explore how the medium of photography can be used to turn an ordinary moment in a person’s life into one that is “suspect.” His photographs present Palestinians in the occupied territories as targets of the Israeli soldier, as shahids (martyrs) within their own neighborhoods, and as “wanted men” by the state. The resulting volume, The Resolution of the Suspect (Peabody Museum Press and Radius Books, 2016), was awarded First Place in the 2017 New England Museum Association book awards.

2010   Stephen Dupont (Australia). Dupont's fellowship work, a study of cultural erosion as well as a celebration of Melanesian people, was exhibited at the Peabody Museum in Stephen Dupont: Papua New Guinea Portraits and Diaries. A two-volume presentation of the work, Piksa Niugini: Portraits and Diaries, was published by Peabody Museum Press and Radius Books (2013); it took First Place in the 2014 New England Museum Association book awards. 

2009   Alessandra Sanguinetti (USA/Argentina). Sanguinetti used her fellowship to continue a multiyear profile of two girls living in rural Argentina and their wider social networks for a project called The Life That Came.

2008   Dayanita Singh (India). Singh’s fellowship project began as a visual diary and evolved into “photographic fiction.” The work was exhibited in the 2011 Peabody Museum exhibition House of Love and was co-published in a book of the same name by Peabody Museum Press and Radius Books (2011).

2007   Guy Tillim (South Africa). Tillim’s fellowship took him to five African countries where he documented grand colonial architecture and how it has become part of a contemporary African stage. His fellowship work was exhibited at the Peabody Museum in 2009 and was co-published as Avenue Patrice Lumumba by the Peabody Museum Press and Prestel (2009).