The Andy Warhol Foundation’s announcement of its 2025 Arts Writers Grant recipients arrives as a timely reaffirmation of criticism as a cultural force rather than an accessory.

This year, the foundation will distribute $1.04 million to 31 writers working across Articles, Books, Short-Form Writing, and Translation. Since the program’s launch in 2006, more than 450 writers have received over $13.5 million in support, anchoring art writing as a vital mode of engagement with visual culture. The 2025 cohort, which includes Glenn Adamson, Zoé Samudzi, Jeremy Lybarger, and Catherine G. Wagley, reflects not only excellence of craft but an acute responsiveness to the political, historical, and social pressures shaping art today.

Writing as Infrastructure, Not Afterthought

The Arts Writers Grant was conceived to ensure that criticism remains a living practice—one capable of extending artists’ voices far beyond gallery walls. As Joel Wachs, president of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, notes, art writers “reflect—and shape—critical issues in the social, political, and cultural landscape.” The language is telling. Writing is framed not as commentary alone, but as infrastructure: a system that supports meaning-making, debate, and memory.

This ethos is visible across the 2025 recipients, whose projects range from close readings of exhibitions to expansive historical scholarship. The selected works resist the flattening tendencies of the market, insisting instead on context, contradiction, and care.

Articles: Urgency, History, and the Politics of Visibility

The Articles category foregrounds writing that responds directly to geopolitical and cultural fault lines. Omar Berrada’s Stitching the Desert: Blackness in North African Art examines visual culture through the lens of race and regional identity, while Miriam Felton-Dansky’s study of artist visas traces the bureaucratic mechanisms that shape artistic mobility from the Cold War to the present.

Zoé Samudzi’s essay on postwar Italian memory and cannibal imagery moves fluently between art history and postcolonial theory, while Elliot Josephine Leila Reichert confronts censorship and Palestine through the ethics of exhibition-making. These texts treat art criticism as a site of accountability—where images are inseparable from the conditions under which they circulate.

Books: Expanding the Canon, Rewriting the Map

The Books category offers a panoramic view of contemporary scholarship. Projects such as Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’s Proving Ground, which proposes a genealogy of Black feminist land art, and Jenni Sorkin’s Deviant Scale, examining cloth at the body’s margins, push against entrenched hierarchies of medium and authorship.

Several titles trace transnational currents: Salar Mameni’s Bahamut follows aesthetic flows across the Arabian Sea, while Uranchimeg Tsultem documents resilience among Mongolian artists past and present. Together, these books suggest a canon in motion—less centralized, more porous, and attuned to voices long relegated to the margins.

Short-Form Writing: Precision in a Compressed World

Short-form writing often bears the burden of speed, yet the foundation recognizes its capacity for clarity and impact. Writers such as Glenn Adamson, Tobi Haslett, and Catherine G. Wagley have demonstrated how tightly argued essays and reviews can open complex conversations within limited space.

In an era of shrinking attention spans, this category affirms brevity as a discipline rather than a compromise—a way of sharpening critical insight without sacrificing depth.

Translation: Crossing Languages, Reframing Discourse

Introduced this cycle, the Translation category marks a significant expansion of the grant’s mission. With a $30,000 purse, it supports translators bringing books on contemporary visual art into English. Projects include Jessica Gogan’s translation of Federico Morais’s writings on experimental art and education, and Eriko Ikeda Kay’s translation of Yurie Nagashima’s reflections on photography and girlhood in Japan.

Translation here is treated not as auxiliary labor but as intellectual authorship—an act that reshapes discourse by widening its linguistic and cultural reach.

A Field Defined by Boldness and Care

Pradeep Dalal, director of the Arts Writers Grant, described the 2025 recipients as addressing “bold work and urgent issues.” The phrase captures the dual mandate of contemporary art writing: to take risks while remaining grounded in scholarship. Across categories, the selected projects share a commitment to rigor, historical awareness, and ethical engagement.

They also point toward a future in which art writing is neither insulated from politics nor subsumed by them, but operates as a space of critical mediation.

Sustaining the Language of Art

The Andy Warhol Foundation’s 2025 Arts Writers Grants reaffirm a simple yet radical idea: that art needs language as much as it needs images. By investing in writers who interrogate systems, recover overlooked histories, and translate ideas across borders, the foundation reinforces criticism as an essential cultural practice.

At a moment when speed often eclipses thought, these grants sustain the conditions for writing that lingers—writing that listens, argues, and remembers. In doing so, they help ensure that contemporary art is not only seen, but understood.