Jay Katelansky is the winner of the Chazen Museum Prize for an Outstanding MFA Student. Katelansky is a third-year MFA student in the UW–Madison Art Department. She is from Piscataway, NJ, and received her BFA from Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia. Katelansky will work with Chazen staff to mount her exhibition, Hoodwinked.
ABOUT THE PRIZE
The Chazen Museum of Art awards the annual prize in collaboration with the UW–Madison Art Department; an outside juror makes the selection. The winner receives an honorarium and the opportunity to work with Chazen staff to create an exhibition for the Mayer Gallery at the Chazen.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jay Katelansky uses a variety of media to create installations where she explores her interest in collective trauma and the dehumanization of Black folks in the United States using the vehicles of science fiction, dystopic/utopic narratives, and Black joy. She uses PhantomNegro, a shape shifting, gender shifting, time-traveling being, as a tool to explore Black subjectivity, or the Black narrative. PhantomNegro floats through the past, present, and future, placing themselves at scenes of injustices. PhantomNegro is an omnipresent being who rewrites the dominant narrative of current and past events involving the dehumanization of Black people. This rewritten narrative is not utopic, but rather a method of filling in the gaps in these stories of injustice, thereby allowing the artist the agency, or power, to understand and alter the past. PhantomNegro, and the artist, create a space a collective trauma and experience to be reclaimed and restructured into a sense of belonging, inherently carving out the space for Black joy.
ABOUT THE JUROR
Scott Zieher is co-owner/director of Zieher Smith & Horton a gallery in New York City’s Chelsea district. A published poet, Scott Zieher is also co-founder of the Emergency Press, a not-for-profit organization that produces a biannual literary and arts almanac and publishes manuscripts by emerging poets. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and received an MFA in poetry from Columbia University.
In September 2009, ZieherSmith expanded to a new gallery on West 20th Street, designed by Dufner Heighes Architects. Andrea Smith Zieher and Scott Zieher originally opened the gallery in 2003 on West 25th Street. Zieher Smith & Horton presents technically sound, conceptually grounded artwork in an open environment, emphasizing new artists who reconcile contemporary experience with a strong awareness of historical precedents.
IMAGE: Eric as Phantom, 2015, video still, dimension varies