Curatorial research fellowship supports retrospective exhibition ‘Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art’ to be presented by the Vincent Price Art Museum, Williams College Museum of Art in 2022-23
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has awarded a $42,000 Curatorial Fellowship to C. Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz to prepare a major retrospective of artist Teddy Sandoval (1949–1995) scheduled for 2022–23 at the Williams College Museum of Art and the Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College.
Chavoya, professor of Art and Latina/o Studies at Williams College, last teamed up with independent curator Frantz to co-curate the exhibition Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A., jointly organized by ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, for the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA in 2017. Axis Mundo subsequently traveled to venues across the United States through Independent Curators International (ICI) and was presented at the Williams College Museum of Art from Sept. 6–Dec. 9, 2019. This exhibition explored the intersections among a network of more than 50 artists and was the first of its kind to excavate histories of experimental art practice, collaboration, and exchange by a group of Los Angeles-based queer Chicanx artists between the late 1960s and early 1990s.
The Warhol Fellowship, announced June 24, will support Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art.Sandoval, whose work was also included in Axis Mundo and is also a part of the museum’s collection, was a central figure in intersecting queer and Chicanx artistic circles in Los Angeles, as well as an active participant in international avant-garde movements. His life and career were cut short by HIV/AIDS in 1995. The forthcoming exhibition will illuminate Sandoval’s diverse creative output, focusing on prints, ceramics, mail art, and multiples. It will chart his engagement with gender play and tropes of masculinity, the (queer) domestic sphere, and camp as a tactic of political refusal.
The Curatorial Fellowship will enable Chavoya and Frantz to conduct new research to situate Sandoval’s practice within a genealogy of queer Latinx and Latin American artistic experimentation. The curators plan to travel to Colombia, Brazil, Ottawa, San Francisco, and elsewhere to visit studios of living artists or their estates and archives.
“Throughout the process of organizing Axis Mundo, we always had our eye on revisiting Teddy’s work and showing it in greater depth,” explain Chavoya and Frantz. “This fellowship enables us to further explore his importance while charting new trajectories for thinking about intersectional Latinx and queer art histories across the Americas.”
Launched in 2008, the Curatorial Fellowships from the Warhol Foundation aim to encourage curatorial research leading to new scholarship in the field of contemporary art. Grants of up to $50,000 are designed to support travel, archival research, convening of colleagues, and interviews.
Pamela Franks, Class of 1956 Director, states, “At Williams College Museum of Art, we are deeply committed to advancing new art historical research, especially of understudied artists in the collection. We are immensely grateful to the Warhol Foundation for its support of Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz’s retrospective of Sandoval’s work, and are delighted to collaborate with another college art museum to share this exhibition with the public.”
In accordance with Andy Warhol’s will, the mission of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts is the advancement of the visual arts. The foundation manages an innovative and flexible grants program while also preserving Warhol’s legacy through creative and responsible licensing policies and extensive scholarly research for ongoing catalogue raisonné projects. To date, the foundation has given over $200 million in cash grants to over 1,000 arts organizations in 49 states and abroad and has donated 52,786 works of art to 322 institutions worldwide.
More information about the foundation is available at warholfoundation.org.
About the Curators
Ondine Chavoya is a Professor of Art History and Latina/o Studies at Williams College, where he teaches courses in contemporary art and visual culture. A specialist in Chicanx and Latinx art, Chavoya’s writings have appeared in Afterimage, Artforum, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, CR: The New Centennial Review, Performance Research, Wide Angle, and in numerous exhibition catalogues and edited volumes. He is also co-editor of Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology (Duke University Press, 2019). His curatorial projects have addressed issues of collaboration, experimentation, social justice, and archival practices in contemporary art. Recent exhibitions include Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972–1987 (with Rita Gonzalez, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Williams College Museum of Art, 2011), Robert Rauschenberg: Autobiography (with Lisa Dorin, Williams College Museum of Art, 2017), and Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. (with David Evans Frantz, 2017). Chavoya served as the International Consulting Curator to the Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI) in Perú from 2018-2020.
David Evans Frantz is an independent curator based in Los Angeles. He was Associate Curator at the Palm Springs Art Museum from 2018 to 2019 and curator at ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries from 2011 to 2018. His curatorial projects examine alternative art movements, queer politics and culture, historical erasure, and archival practices in contemporary art. In 2017 he co-curated with C. Ondine Chavoya the exhibition Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A., a collaboration between ONE Archives and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles for Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. Axis Mundo has traveled to multiple venues across the United States and the catalogue has been the recipient of nine awards, including an Award for Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC).
Williams College Museum of Art
The Williams College Museum of Art makes dynamic art experiences to incite new thinking about art, museums, and the world. At the heart of the Williams College campus, the museum draws on the collaborative and multidisciplinary ethos of the surrounding college to enliven the more than 15,000 works in its growing collection. The museum and its collection are a catalyst for student learning and community engagement. WCMA is located on Main Street in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The museum is open 10:00 am to 5:00 pm, Thursdays 10:00 am to 8:00 pm, and closed Wednesdays from September through May. In June, July, and August WCMA is open every day 10:00 am to 5:00 pm and 10:00 am to 8:00 pm on Thursdays. WCMA is free and open to all. The museum building is temporarily closed to the public due to COVID-19. For more information, visit artmuseum.williams.edu.
Press Contacts
Joellen Adae, Director of Communications, [email protected]
Rebecca Dravis, Communications Assistant, [email protected]