Queer|Art Announces Winner Of 2022 Illuminations Grant For Black Trans Women Visual Artists

Queer|Art, New York City's home for the creative and professional development of LGBTQ+ artists, has announced the winner of the third annual Illuminations Grant for Black Trans Women Visual Artists, Utē Petit. The New Orleans-based visual artist will receive a $10,000 cash grant, professional development support, and individual studio visits with members of the judges panel to support her practice.

2022 Illuminations Grant Judge and visual artist, Jonathan Lyndon Chase writes: "Utē's work is multi-layered, sensory touching on physical and metaphysical energies. Hungry and visually generous in the different modes of expression that are generously inviting the viewer to enter an ever growing world. The attention to poetic detail in the drawings are filled with vigor and show subjects I can relate to. Honest and Raw unapologetic gestures. The colors are very striking and bold throughout the 2d works' sculptural moments and space vibrant spiritual landscapes and nature installations."

2022 Illuminations Grant Judge and legendary performer and fashion icon, Connie (Girl) Fleming continues: "Petit's work spoke to me with a deeply connective scoop, rooted in our connection to mother earth, & our responsibility as her steward. Illustrating our symbiotic existence that we so often forget at our very peril."

Interdisciplinary artist and farmer, Utē Petit narrates Black-Indigenous land traditions across visual and embodied mediums. Petit's visual language convenes figurative drawing, woven and quilted textile practices, and installation to render Afro-Indigenous sovereignty across the Americas. Across her layered work, Petit pulls from inherited familial textile traditions to chronicle legacies of interdependence and sovereignty among Black-Indigenous peoples: the artist learned quilting from her maternal grandmothers who were quilters in Misi-Ziibi. For Petit, cooking and gardening are somatic vehicles for historicizing and imagining speculative futures. Her current body of work builds off these familial legacies, worldbuilding practices, and aesthetic traditions to imagine a new nation called Ailanthaland-"nation of heavenly beings." Petit's Ailanthaland strives "to be an ecological paradise tenable to all beings, following the stewardship of Afro-Indigenous peoples of the Americas."

As the third annual winner of the Illuminations Grant for Black Trans Women Visual Artists, Utē Petit was selected from a pool of 66 applicants. The judges, who were chosen by Queer|Art to review applications for the national grant include visual artists, performers, and curators from around the country: Connie (Girl) Fleming, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, and Kimberly Drew. Developed and named in partnership with Mariette Pathy Allen, Aaryn Lang, and Serena Jara, this annual grant draws attention to an existing body of work, sheds light on the under-recognized contributions of Black trans women visual artists, and provides critical support to their continuing work.

About Utē Petit, Winner

Utē Petit works as a visual artist, and farmer. Her current work aspires toward a new nation called Ailanthaland: nation of heavenly beings. Ailantha aspires to be an ecological paradise tenable to all beings, following the stewardship of Afro-Indigenous peoples of the Americas. She also loves to cook, and is a big transit nerd. She is often found daydreaming about persimmons, airplanes, and hugging cypress trees.

On receiving the 2022 Illuminations Grant, Utē Petit writes: "This award has brought the possibility of having a professional studio into reality for me. I plan to find a new space to create larger work, while also making time to further devote to my practice. This is a blessing that will allow me to consider personal and career moves that were previously beyond my means."

In addition to Utē Petit, four other visual artists were acknowledged as finalists for this year-Courtney Washington, Tia Jackson, Av Tuitt, and z tye.