Toni Beauchamp Prize in Critical Art Writing

Gulf Coast Journal of Literature and Fine Art is proud to announce the winner of the 2019 Toni Beauchamp Prize in Critical Art Writing, Ra Malika Imhotep, for her essay "On Retrieval."

In its third year, the Toni Beauchamp Prize seeks to support young and mid-career art writers who combine scholarship and journalism, a unique voice, and literary excellence.

The two runners up include Philip Wesley Gates for "Being Free and Being Food: Consumption and Resistance at zürich moves! 2019" and Wenting Tao for "How the Curatorial Stereotyping of Chinese Art Essentializes the Work of Zheng Guogu."

From the judge, Jessica Lynne, founding editor of ARTS.BLACK:

"This essay on Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle begins with a conjuring, and the writer does the rigorous, deft work of bearing witness to Hinkle’s transmissions. With a close reading of the recordings of disappeared Black women, who comprise Hinkle’s series The Evanesced, for example, as well as an astute assessment of the artist’s cosmology, Kentifrica, we as readers must reckon with the myriad ways that we are implicated in the tasks, responsibility, and obligation of seeing Black women in a manner that calls attention to, as the writer notes, “the expensive myths” that mark their pathways. This essay grounds Hinkle’s gestures in an ecology of cultural and spiritual production, from Saidiya Hartman to Zora Neale Hurston to Yoruba Egungun, as a way of naming the aesthetic terrain Hinkle traverses. This essay is as unflinching as it is careful, the result of what it means to be embedded within the many textures of an artist’s practice."

Read Glasstire Article here