Center for Art＆Advocacy Announces 2024 Right of Return Fellows

The Center for Art & Advocacy has revealed the six 2024 recipients of its Right of Return Fellowships. Founded in 2017 by formerly incarcerated artists Jesse Krimes and Russell Craig, the fellowship program is the first national program of its kind aimed at assisting those in creative professions who have been affected by the justice system. Since 2022, it has been administered by the Center for Art & Advocacy, alegacy projectof Agnes Gund’s Art for Justice Fund; the center, of which Krimes is executive director, is additionally funded by the Mellon Foundation, which kicks in for the fellowship alongside the Hearthland Foundation and the Arison Arts Foundation.

The Right of Return Fellowship provides previously incarcerated artists whose projects are aimed at transforming the criminal, legal, and immigration systems with an annual unrestricted award of $10,000 and $10,000 in project development funds. Fellows are invited to attend an annual retreat, where they are given the opportunity to network with previous fellows, advocates, industry leaders, and funders.

This year’s fellows are Antwan Williams, Gary Tyler, George Morton, Kendra Ware, Omari Booker, and Rahsaan Thomas. Williams, a producer, cinematographer, and composer, will put the money toward his experimental dance film Until Then, which explores the criminal legal system through hip-hop and contemporary dance, while Tyler, a visual artist, will expand on his series of quilting-fabric portraits of people on death row. Morton, a visual artist, will create a series of classical-realist portraits and still-lifes investigating the ways in which incarceration impacts communities and family structures. Ware, a performance-based multidisciplinary artist, will develop a series of site-specific creative engagement ancestral huts archiving the African American experience of land relating to the Great Migration. Booker, a visual artist and writer, will expand a previous solo exhibition based on his fifteen-year drug charge–related prison sentence into a book, while Thomas, a podcast host, film producer, director, and writer, will continue work on his DaKulture project, which features nonnarrative interviews with creatives incarcerated in Michigan State Prison.