This award honors visual artists who have made a commitment to working for equality in their daily lives and artistic practice with a $25,000 stipend.
Current Winner
T. Eliott Mansa is a Miami-based visual artist. Mansa has developed an assemblage practice that incorporates found materials from roadside memorials, applying ritual practices from West African, Caribbean, and Southern religious and vernacular sculptural traditions. He is interested in questioning the efficacy of political art making, and looks to apotropaic art-making practices, incorporating ritual practice to honor, memorialize, protect, and defend Black Lives from state and extra-judicial violence. Mansa attended the Yale School of Art, received a BFA from the University of Florida (2000), and an MFA from CUNY-Hunter College (2018).
Recent exhibition venues include the African American Museum of the Arts, DeLand FL; Coral Gables Museum, Coral Gables, FL; and Miami Museum of Contemporary Art of the African Diaspora, Miami, FL. Mansa is a recipient of the 2019 and 2022 Ellies Creator Awards, Green Space Initiative Grant, and the YoungArts Microgrant. Mansa has attended residencies at Oolite Arts, Miami Beach, FL; Artpace, San Antonio, TX; the Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY; and the Artists in Residence in Everglades, Miami, FL. His artwork is in the collections of the African American Museum of the Arts, DeLand, FL; the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL; and the Jorge M. Pérez Collection at El Espacio 23, Miami, FL.
