Congratulations to Amir H. Fallah for receiving the 2020 Artadia Award
Amir H. Fallah was selected as the Marciano Art Foundation Artadia awardee and will receive $25,000 in unrestricted funds.
In the first round of jurying, Cole Akers, Curator and Special Projects Manager, The Glass House, New Canaan; Jova Lynne, Curator, the MoCAD, Detroit; and Anuradha Vikram, Independent Curator and writer based in Los Angeles, selected six finalists. Assistant Curator, Modern Art at LACMA, joined Anuradha Vikram for the second round of evaluations. The jurors conducted studio visits with each of the six finalists to determine the awardees.
Of the awardees, Katia noted: “While Amir H. Fallah’s, Beatriz Cortez’s, and Suné Woods’s practices are notably distinct, they all engage non-linear temporalities and the multivalent nature of identity in thoughtful and poignant ways. In his exuberant paintings and installation environments, Fallah deftly draws from sources as varied as Persian miniatures, children’s books, and modernist abstraction to present hybrid worlds and layered narratives that unfold over time.”
Anuradha expressed, “Amir H. Fallah is a painter who has reconciled pictorial narrative with the formal mandates of abstraction to make fascinating and rich images that reward repeated looking.”
Artadia is a national non-profit organization that supports artists with unrestricted awards followed by a lifetime of program opportunities. Artadia is unique in that it allows any artist to apply, engages nationally recognized artists and curators to review work, and culminates in direct grants. Since 1999, Artadia has awarded over $5 million to more than 338 artists in Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco.
Fallah received his BFA in Fine Art & Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and his MFA in painting at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions across the United States and abroad. Selected solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson; South Dakota Art Museum, Brookings SD; Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland OR; and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland KS.
In 2009, the artist was chosen to participate in the 9th Sharjah Biennial. In 2015, Fallah received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. In 2019, Fallah’s painting Calling On The Past received the Northern Trust Purchase Prize at EXPO Chicago. In 2020, Fallah was awarded the COLA Individual Artist Fellowship and the Artadia grant. The artist has a current solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson and has a forthcoming solo exhibition with Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles.
The artist is in the permanent collection of the Pérez Art Museum Miami; McEvoy Foundation For The Arts, San Francisco; Nerman Museum, Kansas City; SMART Museum of Art at the University of Chicago; Davis Museum, Massachusetts; The Microsoft Collection, Washington; Plattsburg State Art Museum, NY; Cerritos College Public Art Collection, CA; and Salsali Private Museum, Dubai, UAE.
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