2019 USA Fellowship
2019 USA Fellowship
![<em>Color</em>, 2017. Dropcloth, vintage Seminole patchwork, house paint, stretch neon, old quilt top, cotton batting. Piecework Collective Show.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/b89b6e99-7854-4d9f-a7b8-be24b774a144/fussell-coulter1.jpg?crop=500%2C491%2C0%2C0&width=500)
Landfill Quilt by Coulter Fussell, 2016. Found quilt from county landfill, house paint, fluorescent knit, house paint, cotton batting.
![<em>Roof Deck</em> at MoMA PS1 by Erin Besler and Ian Besler, 2015. Model photo. Proposal for MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program, dimensions variable.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/c5f08457-4207-44bd-b2a9-003ed53b0b27/besler-and-sons1-scaled.jpg?crop=2560%2C1656%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Roof Deck at MoMA PS1 by Erin Besler and Ian Besler, 2015. Model photo. Proposal for MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program, dimensions variable.
Photo by Walker Olesen.
![<em>#466B, Converging Paths: Turquoise</em>, 2018. Silk, linen, digital jacquard, hand woven TC2 loom, painted warp, shifted weft ikat, 45.5 x 28.5 inches.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/0c4c9cb7-73b6-475d-9519-7f6f81d56b78/lessmanmoss-janice-1.jpg?crop=1271%2C1920%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
#466B, Converging Paths: Turquoise, 2018. Silk, linen, digital jacquard, hand woven TC2 loom, painted warp, shifted weft ikat, 45.5 x 28.5 inches.
![<em>JACK &</em> by Kaneza Schaal, 2017. Theater. BRIC Lab residency, New York City.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/a94c781d-8749-4c49-91ce-c8cf9258b336/schaal-kaneza5-jack.jpg?crop=2000%2C1273%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
JACK & by Kaneza Schaal, 2017. Theater. BRIC Lab residency, New York City.
![<em>Snow in Midsummer</em> by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, 2018. Stage play. Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ashland, OR.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/cba4288e-0c0f-47a1-a917-2f99ca1c6b94/cowhig-frances1-scaled.jpg?crop=2560%2C1733%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Snow in Midsummer by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, 2018. Stage play. Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ashland, OR.
![<em>Painkillers</em> by Hyphen-Labs, 2017.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/bd4bfd40-ce39-47e4-8a8b-c4c8eab28b11/hyphen-labs5-scaled.jpg?crop=2560%2C1440%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Painkillers by Hyphen-Labs, 2017.
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/ab599db0-87a5-4bb7-b3fc-a07e84d87a24/TrailerofemLaMedeaembyYaraTravieso,2017.Theatricalmusicalandlivefilm.PS122emCOILFestivalem,BRICArtsMediaHouseandDanceFilmsAssociation,NewYorkCity..png?crop=2833%2C1594%2C0%2C130&width=1000)
Trailer of La Medea by Yara Travieso, 2017. Theatrical musical and live film. PS122 COIL Festival, BRIC Arts Media House and Dance Films Association, New York City.
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/278514a6-b40b-46a7-a6b1-5ca24f7483df/RecordingofemTuttaranaembyReenaEsmail,2017.SATBChoir,UniversityofNorthTexas,UniversitySingers;LindsayPopeGregory,conductor.WinspearHall,CollegeofMusic,UniversityofNorthTexas..png?crop=3160%2C1778%2C176%2C0&width=1000)
Recording of Tuttarana by Reena Esmail, 2017. SATB Choir, University of North Texas, University Singers; Lindsay Pope Gregory, conductor. Winspear Hall, College of Music, University of North Texas.
will misunderstand my silence
as a lack of love, or interest, instead
of a tent city built for my own mind,
I worry I can no longer pretend
enough to get through another
year of pretending I know
that I understand time, though
I can see my own hands; sometimes,
I worry over how to dress in a world
where a white woman wearing
a scarf over her head is assumed
to be cold, whereas with my head
cloaked, I am an immediate symbol
of a war folks have been fighting
eons-deep before I was born: a meteor.
Poem Full of Worry Ending With My Birth, 2018
“When Enebeli Okwara sent his girl out in the world, he did not know what the world did to daughters. He did not know how quickly it would wick the dew off her, how she would be returned to him hollowed out, relieved of her better parts. Before this, they are living in Port Harcourt in a bungalow in the old Ogbonda Layout. Her mother is in America reading for a Masters in Business Administration. She has been there for almost three years in which her eleven-year-old bud of a girl has bloomed. Enebeli and the girl have survived much in her absence, including a disturbance at the market which saw him and the girl separated for hours while people stampeded, trying to get away from a commotion that turned out to be two warring market women who’d had just about enough of each other’s tomatoes. They survived a sex talk, birthed by a careless joke an uncle had made at a wedding, about the bride taking a cup of palm wine to her husband and leaving with a cup of, well, and the girl had questions he might as well answer before she asked someone who might take it as an invitation to demonstrate. They survived the crime scene of the girl’s first period, as heavy a bleeder as she was a sleeper, the red seeping all the way through to the other side of the mattress. They survived the girl discovering this would happen every month.
Three long years have passed and the girl is fourteen and there is a boy and he is why Enebeli is currently entrenched in what passes for the lobby to the headmaster’s office, a narrow hall painted a blaring glossy white meant to discourage the trailing of dirty child fingers but let’s be serious. He’s seated on the narrow bench meant for children and his adult buttocks find awkward purchase. The girl is in trouble for sending the boy a note and it is not the first time. Enebeli has seen the boy and, even after putting himself in the shoes of a fourteen-year-old girl, doesn’t see the appeal. The boy is a little on the short side. The boy has one ear that is significantly larger than the other. It’s noticeable. One can see the difference. Whoever cuts the boy’s hair often misses a spot so that it sticks up in uneven tufts. The only thing that saves the boy from Enebeli is that he seems as confused about the girl’s attention as everyone else.”
Light, 2015
![<em>Untitled (Quiet Strength II)</em> by Dyani White Hawk, 2017. Acrylic on canvas, 84 × 60 inches.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/33fbf298-339d-4d26-8943-f8007e58adc5/white-hawk-dyani1-scaled.jpeg?crop=1829%2C2560%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Untitled (Quiet Strength II) by Dyani White Hawk, 2017. Acrylic on canvas, 84 × 60 inches.
Photo by Rik Sferra.
![Traditional Passamaquoddy black ash pack baskets. Black ash, leather straps.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/e508ebfe-9b55-4ccb-946b-29d27a73fa9f/frey-gabe4-scaled.jpg?crop=2560%2C2560%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Traditional Passamaquoddy black ash pack baskets. Black ash, leather straps.
![<em>Prow</em>, 2016. Clay, glaze, wood, paint, 20 x 26 x 6 inches.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/e515ab0f-298b-41e4-8f48-bad5e3444780/harvey-samuel3-scaled.jpg?crop=2560%2C2560%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Prow, 2016. Clay, glaze, wood, paint, 20 x 26 x 6 inches.
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/46bb97dc-3414-42b9-9a7b-b5888cc5ed6d/TraileremMotherlandembyRamonaS.Diaz.2017..png?crop=3464%2C1949%2C1%2C8&width=1000)
Trailer Motherland by Ramona S. Diaz, 2017.
![<em>living monuments in historical chapters</em>. Oil on canvas, hand-painted tarp, live plant matter. Installation view.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/744a71c6-a57e-4b58-b0d5-dbc34329564f/baez-firelei1.jpg?crop=1500%2C1000%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
living monuments in historical chapters. Oil on canvas, hand-painted tarp, live plant matter. Installation view.
On Zerious Meadows’s last day in prison, he woke up at 4 a.m., as usual, because his cell mate works in the kitchen and leaves early to prepare breakfast. He listened to the radio — a station that plays R&B and rap from “the time when it had meaning” — and then went about distributing the last of the items he’d accumulated in 47 years behind bars.
Meadows, 63, gave his television to an 18-year-old who had just arrived at Macomb Correctional Facility, in New Haven, Michigan, and his radio to one of the older inmates. Someone asked why he didn’t sell the radio — it’s a large, solid one, unlike the ones the prison sells now, and he could have gotten as much as $200. Meadows had no use now for what passes as prison currency: “I didn’t want to be paid in potato chips or whatever other commissary items,” he said.
He gave away his dark blue prison uniforms, jackets, sweatshirts, and T-shirts, but kept the underwear he’d recently purchased, to wear under the clothes his sister Pamela had bought him.
And then, he waited.
When I met with Meadows on the night of November 13, just hours before his scheduled release, he seemed at once calm and nervous. He would not look at me directly, beyond a passing glance, and instead often looked at his impeccably shined black shoes. He hadn’t eaten all day, and his head hurt — “probably from the stress,” he said. He listed all the things he planned to do the next day — see his family, including the many nieces, nephews, and their children, some of whom he had never met. His mother was going to cook one of his favorite things — a turkey leg — and he just wanted to have some time alone with her. But he didn’t want to dream too hard, in case it didn’t happen, because this was the second time he’d been promised his freedom.
“When I go home, I just want to sit on the floor up against the couch next to my mother,” he said. “But I won’t believe it’s happening until I walk out those doors.”
Meadows was never supposed to get out of prison. In 1971, he was sentenced to life without parole, charged with throwing a Molotov cocktail into a house on Lemay Street, about a mile west of the Detroit River, and setting it on fire. Two children died in the fire, 12-year-old Ruth Taylor and her 4-year-old sister, Regina. Meadows was just 16 when he was arrested and 17 when he was sentenced.
The United States in the only country that sentences minors to life in prison without parole. In 2012, the Supreme Court ruled in Miller v. Alabama that mandatory life without parole sentences for juveniles were unconstitutional. In January 2016, the Supreme Court tackled the case of retroactivity, ruling in favor of Henry Montgomery, who was sentenced to life for a crime he committed in 1963, when he was 17, and allowing the approximately 1,500 people who were sentenced before 2012 a chance at release.
Zerious Meadows was sentenced to life without parole at 17. Now, he’s struggling with freedom, 2017
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/64805b91-259b-4849-8dc3-b975ed0f86ce/Juan_dies_video-thumbnail-4.png?crop=3509%2C1974%2C19%2C0&width=1000)
VIVA TLAPEHUALA (paso doble calentano) by José Isaías Salmerón, 2017. Michoacán, México. Performed by Juan Díes, guitar; Eréndira Izguerra , violin.
![<em>Ancestor from the Future</em>, 2017. Regalia. Co-created at Djerassi Resident Artist Program with installation artist Christy Chow. Photo by Christy Chow.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/fb70925a-a881-4105-8428-f0cabe840d45/warden-allison2-scaled.jpg?crop=1707%2C2560%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Ancestor from the Future by Allison Akootchook Warden, 2017. Regalia. Co-created at Djerassi Resident Artist Program with installation artist Christy Chow.
Photo by Christy Chow.
![<em>La espera/The waiting</em>, 2013. Cotton canvas, rubber, synthetic hair. Photo by Erasmo Wong.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/9648891f-215c-4113-a7f7-5bf91dd16da5/cuba-lucia1.jpg?crop=2500%2C1667%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
La espera/The waiting by Lucia Cuba, 2013. Cotton canvas, rubber, synthetic hair.
Photo by Erasmo Wong.
![<em>Pomona’s Spoon</em> by Michelle Holzapfel, 2009. Wood, surfaces textured with pyrography and scorching, 4 × 13 × 22 inches.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/c085c9e6-389f-4db0-bfa3-4a8c765229b5/Holzapfel_Michelle1-retouched.jpg?crop=2072%2C1288%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Pomona’s Spoon by Michelle Holzapfel, 2009. Wood, surfaces textured with pyrography and scorching, 4 × 13 × 22 inches.
Photo by David Holzapfel.
![<em>Quipu Womb</em>, 2017. Cecilia Vicuña, raw wool, 8 x 6 meters. W. EMST Museum, Athens.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/51fb47b5-b982-4fec-b736-ebbefdf626eb/vicuna-cecilia1.jpg?crop=1280%2C853%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Quipu Womb by Cecilia Vicuña, 2017. Raw wool, 8 × 6 meters. EMST, National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens, Greece.
![<em>Giddy-Up!</em>, 2018. Wood, natural and water color pigments, varnish, beeswax, 16 x 13 x 9.5 inches.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/2a6450fa-9971-4798-9f00-957563440ca0/lopez-arthur4-scaled.jpg?crop=2156%2C2560%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Giddy-Up!, 2018. Wood, natural and water color pigments, varnish, beeswax, 16 x 13 x 9.5 inches.
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/c9fee9a8-3b45-416f-8666-93bf16506cac/Carole_frances_lung_video-cover.png?crop=3320%2C1868%2C1%2C125&width=1000)
T-shirt shopping bag by Carole Frances Lung, 2017. Video.
Then she'd say, Of course, I wanted you
once you were here. She's not cruel. Just practical.
Like a kitchen knife. Still, the blade. And care.
When she washed my hair, it hurt; her nails
rooting my thick curls, the water rushing hard.
It felt like drowning, her tenderness.
As a girl, she'd been last
of ten to take a bath, which meant she sat
in dirty water alone; her mother in the yard
bloodletting a chicken; her brothers and sisters
crickets eating the back forty, gone.
Is gentleness a resource of the privileged?
In this respect, my people were poor.
We fought to eat and fought each other because
we were tired from fighting. We had no time
to share. Instead our estate was honesty,
which is not tenderness. In that it is
a kind of drowning. But also a kind of air.
My Mother Told Us Not To Have Children, 2013
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/cc1cf37b-b987-490f-a280-9d39d1c0f08a/VideoDocumentationofemThirdTrinityembyTeoCastellans,2014.Theater,writtenandperformedbyTeoCastellanos,directionandDramaturgybyTarellAlvinMcCraney,MiamiLightProject,Miami,Florida..png?crop=3159%2C1777%2C0%2C62&width=1000)
Video Documentation of Third Trinity by Teo Castellanos, 2014. Theater, written and performed by Teo Castellanos, direction and Dramaturgy by Tarell Alvin McCraney, Miami Light Project, Miami, Florida.
![<em>The War On Proof</em>, 2017. Inkjet print, vinyl, magnets on metal sheet.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/503ad024-00dc-45df-a8ac-ea6b37fff2ce/huxtable-juliana1.jpg?crop=1320%2C2100%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
The War On Proof, 2017. Inkjet print, vinyl, magnets on metal sheet.
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/cb57013b-f32b-49dd-b78d-6c70c533c260/WithinTheseWalls2017byLenoraLeeDance.png?crop=%2C%2C%2C&width=1000)
Video documentation of Within These Walls by Lenora Lee, 2017. Angel Island Immigration Station, San Francisco Bay.
![<em>MANY</em>, 2018. Installation. Platform to facilitate migration through an exchange of needs. Launched at the US Pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale. Photo © Tom Harris, Courtesy of the School of the Art Institute and the University of Chicago.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/0fcc7f7b-7f14-43ab-9aa8-6424bcddc592/easterling-keller1.jpg?crop=8446%2C5686%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
MANY, 2018. Installation. Platform to facilitate migration through an exchange of needs. Launched at the US Pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale. Photo © Tom Harris, Courtesy of the School of the Art Institute and the University of Chicago.
![<em>Duilian</em>, 2016. Production still. Photo by Ringo Tang.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/308ed2cd-ac5a-4796-8e3d-d6165b91172f/tsang-wu-1-scaled.jpg?crop=2560%2C1707%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Duilian, 2016. Production still. Photo by Ringo Tang.
![<em>Cupboard VIII</em>, 2018. Stoneware, steel, raffia, Albany slip, 125 x 120 inches.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/38895568-25eb-4d07-ace1-f23e993374cb/leigh-simone1-scaled.jpg?crop=1920%2C2560%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Cupboard VIII by Simone Leigh, 2018. Stoneware, steel, raffia, Albany slip, 125 × 120 inches.
![](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/b8622ec3-be89-459c-b389-46b875f0b8cd/Screenshot2024-07-15at3.26.36PM.png?crop=3427%2C1928%2C53%2C0&width=1000)
Video documentation of Beware of the Dandelions by Complex Movements, 2016. Detroit.
Video by The Right Brothers.