The BRC Prize
The Black Reconstruction Collective Prize recognizes cultural practitioners at pivotal points in their practice by acknowledging them with a $10,000 unrestricted award, allowing them full control over the use of funds. The BRC recognizes that this kind of support can provide a practitioner with the stability that keeps them working and prizes like this make that a possibility. This prize was created by the founders of the Black Reconstruction Collective as a way to launch the organization as a funder and support system for Black creatives.
2023 Awardees
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Black Quantum Futurism
Black Quantum Futurism is an interdisciplinary creative practice between Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips that weaves quantum physics and Afrodiasporan concepts of time, ritual, text, and sound, creating counterhistories and Black quantum futures that challenge exclusionary, mainstream versions of time. Black Quantum Futurism has created a number of community-based projects, performances, experimental music projects, installations, workshops, books, short films, zines, including the Community Futures Lab, Black Woman Temporal Portal, and the Black Time Belt. BQF Collective has been awarded a 2022 Creative Capital Fellowship, 2020 Arts at CERN Artist Residents, 2020-2022 Vera List Center Fellow, 2021 Knight Art + Tech Fellows, 2017 Center for Emerging Visual Artists Fellow, and 2017 Pew Fellow. BQF has presented, exhibited, and performed at documenta fifteen, Copenhagen Contemporary. Counterpublic, REDCAT, Chicago Architecture Biennial, Monument Lab x Village of Art and Humanities, Manifesta 13, ICA London, Shanghai Art Biennale, and many more.
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Zoé Samudzi
Zoé Samudzi is the Charles E. Scheidt Visiting Assistant Professor of Genocide Studies and Genocide Prevention at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. She holds a PhD in Medical Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. She is also a Research Associate with the Center for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC) at the University of Johannesburg.
Zoé is a writer and critic whose work has appeared in Art in America, Artforum, Bookforum, The New Inquiry, The Architectural Review, The New Republic, the Funambulist, and other outlets. She is an associate editor with Parapraxis Magazine, a contributing writer at Jewish Currents, and co-author of As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation (AK Press).
She is represented by Alison Lewis at the Francis Goldin Literary Agency
2022 Awardees
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Tonika Lewis Johnson
Tonika Lewis Johnson is a photographer/social justice artist and life-long resident of Chicago’s South Side neighborhood of Englewood. She is also co-founder of two community-based organizations, Englewood Arts Collective and Resident Association of Greater Englewood, that mobilize people and resources for positive change in Greater Englewood.
She plans to use these funds to directly support her ongoing project Inequity for Sale which explores the legalized theft of homes and the effects it has had on Black communities. In the 50s and 60s, using Land Sale Contracts, properties and income were stolen from aspiring Black homeowners by predatory lenders and has directly contributed to inequity in present day Black communities. Inequity for Sale includes land markers and an archival website with documentation of the homes and stories of residents, a podcast, and virtual walking tour that connects this history with present-day conditions.
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Ife Salema Vanable
Ife Salema Vanable is a seeker, interested in tales, histories, theories, and architectures; their formations and tellings. Ife directs i/van/able, a Bronx-based architectural workshop and think tank producing theoretical, speculative, and physical interventions that defy prevailing notions of type, taste and form.
As an architectural historian at the end of her PhD program at Columbia University, Ife Vanable’s practice is deeply rooted in her research. These funds will allow her to begin applying her research around interior spaces as a site of convening and entangled interior geographies into physical objects and writing. Vanable’s upcoming projects will expand her research based work into a tangible spatial practice.