En Foco is always excited to see our past artists continuing to hone and practice their craft. We ask you to join un in celebrating three past En Foco artists, Amarise Carreras Fellowship Awardee 2021, Felicita "Felli" Maynard AGS Featured Artist 2019, and Bashira Webb Fellowship Awardee 2021, for their inclusion in Mosaic Magazine #43: Black/Queer/Lit!

Featured Artists:

Amarise Carreras is a photo-based performance artist from Queens, New York City. They received their BFA in Photography and Film from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2018. They examine their past and present history through co-writing narratives that center their matriarchal lineage. They explore identity within their diasporic experience through installation, performance, and documentation. Amarise has shown in galleries such as Candela Gallery, Transmitter, and is currently featured in Aperture Magazine’s Utopia, Winter 2020 Issue.

Felicita “Felli” Maynard is a first-generation Afro-Latine interdisciplinary artist, archivist, and researcher. Maynard works across many forms of photography, sculpture, and installation. The work explores and critiques how individuals of varying identities from the African diaspora past, present, and future create their pieces of evidence within history. The result is a direct analysis of how structures of colonialism, capitalism, and time have directly impacted and shifted the way descendants of the African diaspora experience space. Maynard works between New Orleans and New York City.

Bashira Webb was born in Baltimore and raised in the Bronx. She began photography classes in the South Bronx, a program called ICP at the Point, where she was awarded the Jocelyne Benzakin Fellowship. The program served as a stepping stone to further her education and begin classes at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan. She formed a collective with her peers called the NYC Bridge Project, whose purpose was to give back to the community and teach a younger generation the importance of telling their own stories through photography. In 2008, the NYC Bridge Project was awarded a grant by the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund to help support its growth.

Mosaic #43: Black/Queer/Lit explores the tender, luminous skin between Blackness and queerness, and it seeks to touch that skin. It wants to find the places where our Blackness itself is—and has always been—queer. It wants to hold the spots where queerness and gender take their shape through histories and futures that are unfailingly, unflaggingly, eternally Black.

ABOUT THE EN FOCO PHOTOGRAPHY FELLOWSHIP:

The En Foco Photography Fellowship is designed to support photographers of color who demonstrate the highest quality of work as determined by a photography panel of peers and industry professionals. The Photography Fellowship Program will award 10 Fellowships at $1,500 per artist, a Fellowship Group Exhibition, and feature the Fellows in the Nueva Luz publication printed and online editions. The Fellowship initiative affirms En Foco’s ongoing commitment to the financial support of artists of color and serves to inform exhibition organizers and curators of an existing pool of quality under-recognized artists.