2023

Deadline: April 30, 2023

Application Form:

Muña is a 3-month art writing program providing a cohort of six writers the opportunity to critically and creatively engage with art writing strategies, readings, exercises, and conversations. The program is structured for writers to develop and refine their practices through guided workshops and peer-review feedback. This is a program collaboration between Sixty Inches From Center and Chuquimarca.

Curator Risa Puleo and writer Claire Voon will provide workshops and editing support this year.

Program at a glance:

  • 3 month hybrid-virtual program (May 31 to August 31, 2023)
  • 6 accepted writers
  • Writer will get to publish to Sixty Inches From Center post-program
  • No application fee

We hope this program continues to strengthen contemporary voices that are covering pertinent artists, exhibitions, works, histories, and worlds through writings. We also hope it seeds more art writers and readers; pollinates new holistic equitable art language; and aids skewing conventions in the art field and ecosystem.

Email info@chuquimarca.com for any further information.

Risa Puleo

Risa Puleo is an independent curator and one of a team of curators organizing the 2023 Counterpublics Triennial in St. Louis. Her exhibition Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the American Justice System was curated forThe Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston in 2018 and traveled open Tufts University Art Gallery in 2020. Monarchs: Brown and Native Contemporary Artists in the Path of the Butterfly was curated for Bemis Center for Contemporary Art during her year as curator-in-residence, and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Blue Star Art Space and Southwest School of Art in San Antonio, The Nerman Art Museum in Overland Park, Kansas.

Other exhibitions have been hosted by ArtPace, San Antonio, the Leslie Lohman Museum in New York City, Franklin Street Works in Stamford, CT, Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, and more. Puleo has Master’s degrees from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and Hunter College and is a doctoral candidate in Northwestern University’s art history program. She has written for Art in AmericaArt Papers, Art 21, Asia Art Pacific, Hyperallergic.com, Modern Painters and other art publications. 

Claire Voon

Claire Voon is a New York–based writer and editor. She is invested in humane and equitable editorial practices, whether reflected in newsroom structures or in the nuances of language. She is currently the copyeditor and fact-checker at Momus, a regular contributor to the Art Newspaper and a copyeditor with Aperture and Apple News.

Previously, she was deputy editor at Borderless Magazine, a member-supported newsroom working to dismantle racist and harmful media coverage of immigrants; the assistant digital editor at Chicago magazine; and a staff reporter at Hyperallergic. Her work has also appeared in publications including ArtforumAmerican CraftArtnewsArtsy, the Brooklyn RailCulturedFrieze, and the New York Times.

Sixty Inches From Center is a collective of writers, editors, artists, curators, librarians, and archivists who publish writings and produce collaborative projects about artists, archival practice, and culture in the occupied lands known as Chicago and the Midwest.

We believe that the stories of artists, cultural workers, archivists, organizers, memory workers, and writers within our communities (LGBTQ+, femme, BIPOC, diasporic, and disability) are essential for understanding history and creating future canons that align with the more liberated and just worlds that reflect our dreams and realities. Our stories need to be preserved and promoted simultaneously, so we work with local and national archives while providing platforms and capsules for the cultural practices of our people.

Chuquimarca is an art library project tasked to gather and share resources related to contemporary art and art histories.The project gathers art books, exhibits projects, and proposes educational programs. It runs a seasonal research group program called Tanda and a summer art writing program, with Sixty Inches From Center, called Muña.