TOSA Studio Award
The Tosa Studio Award recognizes one San Francisco Bay Area artist each year, offering financial support and a studio space to help establish and further an arts career.
Sponsored by Victoria Belco and William Goodman, and currently in its fifth year, the award will annually provide a promising artist a $10,000 stipend and use of a private studio at 1240 Minnesota Street in the Minnesota Street Project studio building for the award period, with access to the Minnesota Street Project facilities and participation in the creative community.
2020 Announcement
Artist Nyame O. Brown has been named the recipient of the 2020-21 Tosa Studio Award. The year long Residency provides a private studio at Minnesota Street Project and a $10,000 stipend. The Tosa Studio Award was created to help talented emerging or under-recognized artists continue to work and advance productive arts careers in the increasingly expensive Bay Area. This year’s awarded artists were chosen from a highly competitive pool of 58 applicants from nominations made by knowledgeable artists, curators and arts professionals.
Four finalists, artists Shaghayegh Cyrous, Rodney Ewing, Rebecca Kaufman, and Danny Lulu each received a $1,000 Finalist Award. The jurors for this year’s award were Trish Bransten, director, Rena Bransten Gallery; Renè de Guzman, Senior Curator of Art for the Oakland Museum of California; and Lucy Puls, artist and professor of Art, University of California, Davis.
Nyame O. Brown describes his pracetice thusly: “My storytelling functions culturally, and the tradition calls for expanding the idiom through improvisation, riffing, and rupturing. By articulating personal history and African Diaspora-multi-threaded history, without precluding the Western cannon, I strategically locate myself within these legacies while engaging anachronistically to create new connections and associations. Creating new allegories for these characters opens an unexplored space for perception of black people, by whites and blacks.”
The Tosa Studio Award will provide Brown with a studio outside of his home, with a space to work, to think, and to see. It will allow him to take on larger work in a variety of materials and realize ideas at a different scale. Equally important for the artist is the opportunity to join an active community of fellow creators.