Texas State’s Joey Fauerso awarded Guggenheim Fellowship for fine arts

Staff Reports

SAN MARCOS – Joey Fauerso, a professor in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts for Fine Arts by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Guggenheim Fellowships are awarded to individuals who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts. Fellowships are intended to further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.

“I am so honored to receive a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Fine Arts category, and to be amongst such a distinguished group of scholars and artists,” Fauerso said. “This fellowship affirms and supports the work I have been making for the last 20 years, and will allow the work to grow and change in new and ambitious directions. Thank you to the Guggenheim Foundation for their support and vision.”  

Fauerso is among 180 fellowship recipients chosen from a group of almost 2,500 applicants. In all, 51 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 31 states and the District of Columbia, and four Canadian provinces are represented in this year’s class of fellows, who range in age from 33 to 75. Nearly 60 fellows have no academic affiliation or hold adjunct or part-time positions.

Fauerso’s work consists mostly of painting, video, installation and performance addressing issues of gender, humor and family. Over the last 10 years she has been working on a series of paintings, drawings and video that rely on gesture and improvisation to explore themes of nature, gender, family and humor. The inspiration for the work is rooted in her experiences growing up in a transcendental meditation community in Iowa, an ongoing interest in the ways gender is expressed and defined in Western art, and most recently her experiences as a parent and observer of the cognitive and creative processes of children. 

Recently her work has been exhibited at the Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, MASS MoCA, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Drawing Center in New York and New Mexico State University Art Museum.

Fauerso is the recipient of multiple grants and residencies, including 2020 Joan Mitchell Grant for Painters and Sculptors, a 2021 Sustainable Arts Foundation grant, the Open Sessions residency at the Drawing Center in New York, the Golden Foundation Grant, Dallas Museum of Art Kimberough Grant, the RAIR artist in residence grant, Yaddo, MacDowell and Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Fauerso will publish the first monograph on her work with French and Michigan Publications this fall.

She received her bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa and her master of fine arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

She lives with her family in San Antonio.

For more information on the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, visit www.gf.org.