2021 SONDHEIM ARTSCAPE PRIZE

Artists: Hoesy Corona, Tsedaye Makonnen, Jonathan Monaghan, Lavar Munroe, and Hae Won Sohn
Jurors: Naz Cuguoğlu, Michelle Grabner, and Meleko Mokgosi
Space: Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland
Dates: May 27 - July 18, 2021

The 2021 Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize Finalists have been selected! Congratulations to the five finalists of this year’s competition: Hoesy Corona, Tsedaye Makonnen, Jonathan Monaghan, Lavar Munroe, and Hae Won Sohn.

The prestigious competition awards a $25,000 fellowship to assist in furthering the career of a visual artist or visual artist collaborators living and working in the Greater Baltimore region. This year, the finalists’ work will be exhibited in person at the Walters Art Museum, on view Thursday, May 27, through Sunday, July 18, 2021. The winner of the 2021 Sondheim Artscape Prize will be announced during a special award ceremony on Saturday, July 10, 2021.

Additionally, works by semifinalists not moving to the finals will be selected by BOPA curator Lou Joseph for a separate exhibition during the summer of 2021. The 2021 jurors are Naz Cuguoğlu, Michelle Grabner, and Meleko Mokgosi.

Visit our social media pages to get to know these phenomenal artists and see their work: Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize Finalists
Hoesy Corona (Baltimore, MD)
Tsedaye Makonnen (Washington, DC)
Jonathan Monaghan (Washington, DC)
Lavar Munroe (Baltimore, MD)
Hae Won Sohn (Baltimore, MD)

Hoesy Corona (Baltimore, MD) is an emerging and uncategorized queer Mexican artist living and working in the United States. He makes work across a variety of media spanning installation, performance, and video. He is a recent Halcyon Arts Lab Fellow 2017-2018 in Washington, DC and a Tulsa Artist Fellow 2019 & 2020 in Tulsa, OK. He creates otherworldly narratives centering marginalized individuals in society by exploring a process based practice that investigates what it means to be a queer Latinx immigrant in a place where there are few. Hoesy has exhibited widely in galleries, museums, and public spaces in the United States and abroad. His colorful sculptural works fitted to the human body have been presented at The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Baltimore Museum of Art, Transformer DC, and The Reach at The Kennedy Center. His research has been supported by various regional and national grants, including The Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award, The Ruby’s Artist Grant, The MAP Fund Grant, and The Andy Warhol Foundation Grit Fund Grant among others. In recent years Hoesy has been in residence at Ox-Box School of Art, Washington College Kohl Gallery Residency, and The Merriweather District Artist in Residence. In 2020 he was the recipient of The Municipal Art Society of Baltimore Artist Travel Prize. www.hoesycorona.com.

Tsedaye Makonnen (Washington, DC) is a multidisciplinary artist whose studio, curatorial and research-based practice threads together her identity as a daughter of Ethiopian immigrants, birthworker and a mother. Makonnen primarily focuses on migration and intersectional feminism; using light, shadow, reflection, embodiment, movement and collaboration as materials. Makonnen is the recipient of a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. She has performed at the Venice Biennale, Art Basel Miami, Art on the Vine (Martha’s Vineyard), Chale Wote Street Art Festival (Ghana), El Museo del Barrio, Fendika Cultural Center (Ethiopia), Festival International d’Art Performance (Martinique), Queens Museum, the Smithsonian’s, and more. In 2018 Makonnen studied sculpture with mentor El Anatsui at his studio in Nigeria. Her light monuments have been exhibited at the August Wilson Cultural Center, National Gallery of Art and UNTITLED Art Fair and is currently being acquired by the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. She has been featured in the NYTimes, Vogue, BOMB, Hyperallergic, Artnet, Artsy, Forbes, and more. Her recent exhibitions are 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London, Park Avenue Armory, National Museum of Women in the Arts, The Momentary and Art at a Time Likes This. In 2020, Makonnen curated a virtual group exhibition with Washington Project for the Arts titled Black Women as/and the Living Archive based on Alisha Wormsley’s film Children of Nan: Mothership and is currently working on publishing an exhibition book in 2021. This upcoming March, Makonnen will be showing with her gallery at Art Dubai. For the upcoming Fall semester she will be the Clark Art Institute’s inaugural Futures Fellow in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She is currently in four exhibitions across the U.S. and Europe and is represented by Addis Fine Art in London & Addis Ababa. She lives in DC with her 10 year old son. www.tsedaye.com.

Jonathan Monaghan (Washington, DC) is an artist working across a range of media, including prints, sculpture and computer animated video, to produce otherworldly objects and narratives. Drawing on wide-ranging sources, such as historical artworks and science fiction, his fantastical pieces examine anxieties associated with digital technology and consumerism. Past exhibitions include The Sundance Film Festival, The Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, and The Palais de Tokyo in Paris. His work has been featured in several media outlets including The New York Times, Vogue, and The Washington Post. www.jonathanmonaghan.com.

Lavar Munroe (Baltimore, MD) (b. 1982, Nassau, Bahamas) earned his BFA from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2007 and his MFA from Washington University in 2013. In 2014, he was awarded a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Munroe was included in Prospect.4: The Lotus in Spite of The Swamp, the New Orleans triennial curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, and the 12th Dakar Biennale, curated by Simon Njami, in Senegal. In 2015, Munroe’s work was featured in All the World’s Futures, curated by Okwui Enwezor as part of the 56th Venice Biennale. Recent group shows include those at the Nasher Museum of Art in Durham; Perez Art Museum, Miami; National Gallery of Bahamas, Nassau; MAXXI Museum of Art, Rome; Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; Virginia Museum of Modern Art, Virginia Beach; and The Drawing Center, New York. Munroe was awarded residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, MacDowell Colony, the Headlands Center for the Arts, Joan Mitchell Center, Thread: Artist Residency & Cultural Center, a project of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and was an inaugural Artists in Residence at the Norton Museum of Art. He is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. Lavar Munroe lives and works between Baltimore, Maryland and Nassau, Bahamas. www.lavar-munroe.com.

Hae Won Sohn (Baltimore, MD) is a visual artist and craftswoman from Seoul, South Korea. In her practice, the artist utilizes studio-artifacts such as broken molds or material remnants; further incorporating the action of de-/reconstruction in her (re)development of form and object-history. While her process metaphorically references the archeological procedures and geographical phenomena, her studio-practice incorporates conscious improvisation and the autonomy of material as a structural and conceptual foundation; further proposing a system built upon failure as a parallel model to success. Being selected as a finalist for the inaugural Galerie Emerging Artist Award (2019) by Galerie Magazine, Sohn’s most recent body of work was exhibited at Emmanuel Barbault Gallery (New York, NY) as part of Monologue aside (2020), her gallery solo. Her work also has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as Emmanuel Barbault Gallery, New York, NY; Gray Contemporary, Houston, TX; MONO Practice, Baltimore, MD; Next Step Studio & Gallery, Ferndale, MI; Zahoorul Akhlaq Gallery of National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan; and Kyung-In Museum of Fine Art, Seoul, South Korea. Originally from Seoul, South Korea, Sohn earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the College of Design at Kookmin University located in Seoul, South Korea, and her Master of Fine Arts degree at the Cranbrook Academy of Art located in Bloomfield Hills, MI. https://haewonsohn.com.

Learn more about the Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize here!