Initiated in 2023, the A.I.R. Commissioning Program for Mid-Career Women and Non-Binary Artists of Color provides three New York City-based artists with significant financial and curatorial support toward the creation of new work to be debuted in a solo exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery in late 2025.
The Commissioning Program aims to bolster A.I.R.’s longtime commitment to supporting women and non-binary artists in building sustainable and enriching artistic practices, and envision a more equitable ecosystem of support for mid-career women and non-binary artists of color, who are less supported by the current arts ecosystem.
Selected by curatorial panelists Rashida Bumbray, Manuela Moscoso, and Lumi Tan, the awardees of the A.I.R. Commissioning Program are Autumn Knight, Gloria Maximo, and Abbey Williams.
The A.I.R. Commissioning Program is made possible by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and the generous support of The Rockefeller Brothers Fund Culpeper Arts & Culture Program and two anonymous donors.
Autumn Knight, Complain/Disappoint, 2023, video still. Courtesy of the artist.
Autumn Knight, New York based, Houston, TX born, is an interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation, video, sound, and text. Drawing from her training in theatre and group dynamics and psychology, Knight makes performances that reshape power dynamics and upend audience expectations of live experiences. Her performance work has been on view at various institutions including Human Resources Los Angeles, Akademie der Kunste, Shedhalle, The Whitney Museum, PICA, The Kitchen, MCA Chicago, Museum Ostwall, BAM, Performance Space New York, and REDCAT. Her performance work WALL is the first live performance work acquired for the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Knight is the recipient of various awards, grants, honors, and fellowships including Art Matters Grant, Anonymous Was a Woman, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize in Visual Art, Live Art Prize Finalist, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
To learn more about Autumn Knight, click here.
Gloria Maximo, Interchange (Trucks on Highway and Roadside Vendors Series), 2023, acrylic gouache on canvas, 48 x 36 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
Gloria Maximo lives and works in Queens, NY. Her art spans painting, performance, and video, and has been exhibited at the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry (University of Chicago), Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), and the Queens Museum in New York City. Maximo experiments with visual representations of labor through movement. Informed by her relations and histories, Maximo’s work aims to explore concepts of relationality to expand understanding within social and economic contexts, fostering more inclusive and equitable exchanges.
To learn more about Gloria Maximo, click here.
Abbey Williams, Overture, 2021, video still. Courtesy of the artist.
Abbey Williams is an artist who mostly makes videos. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union, her MFA from Bard College, and was a participant at The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been exhibited widely in the US and internationally, including TATE Britain, London; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid; Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt; The Studio Museum in Harlem, and was a part of the 2005 Greater New York exhibition at MoMA PS1. She has had solo exhibitions in New York at Bellwether Gallery, Foxy Production, and Sargent’s Daughters. Her work has been written about in Artforum, The New York Times, Flash Art, The New Yorker, and Hyperallergic. She is also a mom, a Libra, a karaoke mic hog, and an oversharer. She lives and works in her hometown of New York City with her sculptor husband, goofball son, and nervous chihuahua.
To learn more about Abbey Williams, click here.