Purchase College's Eric Gottesman Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship

Purchase College, SUNY is pleased to announce that Eric Gottesman, assistant professor of art + design, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of Creative Arts. He is among 175 artists, writers, scholars, and scientists chosen this year. Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, the candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants in the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s 95th competition.

The great variety of backgrounds, fields of study, and accomplishments of Guggenheim Fellows is a unique characteristic of the Fellowship program. In all, 53 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 75 different academic institutions, 31 states and the District of Columbia, and 2 Canadian provinces are represented in this year’s class of Fellows, who range in age from 29 to 82. Close to 60 Fellows have no full-time college or university affiliation.

Purchase College Interim President Dennis Craig said, “We congratulate Eric Gottesman on his selection as a recipient for this prestigious award. We’re proud of his commitment to exploring social justice through his photography and we are grateful for his dedication to inspiring the next generation of socially engaged artists through his work in the classroom, through his work with his non-profit, For Freedoms, and through our Center for Engagement on campus.”

Eric Gottesman makes photographs, videos, writing, installations, and social interventions; he has never made an artwork alone. Through the medium of collaboration, his work questions accepted notions of authorship and power, engages communities in critical creative expression, and proposes models for repairing structural violence and for promoting community as a form of care. Gottesman's projects have been shown at health conferences, in government buildings, on indigenous reserves, inside post-war rubble and in museums like MoMA/PS1, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, MFA Boston, Houston Center of Photography, MoCA Cleveland, and the Addison Gallery of American Art. Gottesman is a Creative Capital Artist, a Fulbright Fellow, an Artadia awardee, an Aaron Siskind Foundation Artist and a co-founder of For Freedoms, an initiative for art and civic engagement that won the 2017 ICP-Infinity Award and was named the "largest creative collaboration in United States history" by TIME Magazine. He is an Assistant Professor of Art at Purchase College, SUNY and a Mentor in the Arab Documentary Photography Program in Beirut, Lebanon.

He will be utilizing the Fellowship to continue work on a film project in Ethiopia and Eritrea that addresses the role art, literature, and culture have played in recent political history.

“It’s exceptionally encouraging to be able to share such positive news at this terribly challenging time” said Edward Hirsch, President of the Foundation. “A Guggenheim Fellowship has always offered practical assistance, helping Fellows do their work, but for many of the new Fellows, it may be a lifeline at a time of hardship, a survival tool as well as a creative one. As we grapple with the difficulties of the moment, it is also important to look to the future. The artists, writers, scholars, and scientific researchers supported by the Fellowship will help us understand and learn from what we are enduring individually and collectively, and it is an honor for the Foundation to help them do their essential work.”

About the Fellowship

Since its establishment in 1925, the Foundation has granted more than $375 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, among whom are scores of Nobel laureates, Fields Medalists, poets laureate, members of the various national academies, and winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Turing Award, National Book Awards, and other important, internationally recognized honors. For more information on the Fellows and their projects, please visit the Foundation’s website at http://www.gf.org.

About Purchase College, SUNY

Purchase College, part of the State University of New York (SUNY) network of 64 universities and colleges, was founded in 1967 by Governor Nelson Rockefeller. His aspiration for Purchase was to create a dynamic campus that combined conservatory training in the visual and performing arts with programs in the liberal arts and sciences, in order to inspire an appreciation for both intellectual and artistic talents in all students. Today, Purchase College, SUNY is a community of students, faculty, and friends where open-minded engagement with the creative process leads to a lifetime of intellectual growth and professional opportunity. For more information about the College, visit www.purchase.edu.