Adjunct Assistant Professor Yasi Alipour ’18 and Visual Arts alumnus Cy Morgan ’16 have been awarded biennial grants from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, which offers $20,000 to artists selected for their talent and individual artistic strength.
Since 1980, this competition has granted more than nine million dollars to 491 artists around the United States, including creators from different fields such as painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, video, and craft media. The artists receive the monetary grant to produce new work pushing their creativity’s boundaries.
“My artistic practice has been informed by the vibrant community of artists, writers, makers, mentors, and students that I have found in New York,” said Alipour, “yet the work also demands my dedication and close attention to the silent, erased, and forgotten moments of history. The Louis Comfort Tiffany foundation offers a unique and rare gift, the opportunity to take time and explore the work with slowness. To be in the studio and listen.”
Alipour, an Iranian artist based in Brooklyn, uses text and folded pieces of paper to explore systems of math and history. She was recently featured in a solo exhibition at Twelve Gates Arts in Philadelphia and also exhibited in Bavan Gallery (Teheran) and Transmitter Gallery (Brooklyn) last year. Her research-based practice spans sculpture, installation, performance, drawing, writing, lectures, and experimentation, and probes personal history to parse issues around political instability and interrupted histories.
Cy Morgan, an artist born in New York, is engaged in the process of making “transient objects.” He uses materials from parking lots and roadsides, combining them with art materials, to be stacked, leaned, changed, and combined into sculptures of various sizes from handheld to monumental. He describes using these materials as “expressive tools not all that different from painting and drawing.”
