The Center Awards: Project Development Grant: Chloé.A
©Chloé.A, Performing with a Shark Jaw
Congratulations to Chloé.A for being selected for CENTER’s Project Development Grant recognizing her project, Yellow tiger on blue background. This documentary project explores the coming-of-age of Taiwanese youth grappling with their dreams, the construction of their identity and geopolitical events. The Project Development Grant provides financial support to fine art, documentary, or photojournalistic works in progress. Assisting a photographer to help complete their project, the grant provides platforms for professional development in the work’s final stages. The Grant includes a $5,000 cash award,Winners Exhibition at CENTER, Complimentary participation and presentation at Review Santa Fe, Public Project Presentation, Publication in LENSCRATCH, Professional Development Seminars access, inclusion in the printed Program Guide, and inclusion in the CENTER Winners Gallery & Archive.
JUROR:Kristen Gaylord • Herzfeld Curator of Photography and Media Arts, Milwaukee Art Museum shares her thoughts on this selection:
Reviewing the submissions to CENTER’s Project Development Grant, I was both inspired by the range and ingenuity of contemporary photography and sobered by the ever-increasing importance of awards like these that offer material support to artists. Dozens of strong projects have stayed with me, including the poignant archival excavations of Eri Morita’s Unknown Flame, the sharp humor and cinematic sweep of Jeremy Dennis’s Rise, and the innovative portrait of a historically Black neighborhood portrayed in Jamil Baldwin’s ongoing Fieldnotes.
Ultimately, I selected Chloé.A’s Yellow tiger on blue background, a thoughtful project on Taiwanese in-betweenness reflecting the political state of the island. I valued the clarity of her plan to complete the project and thorough understanding of the challenges of doing so. But even more, I was struck by the casual beauty and intimacy of her images, which communicate the strangeness and mundanity of daily existence for her cousins, whose lives move forward within what the artist calls Taiwan’s state of “continual suspension.” I eagerly anticipate her completion of this project, and its sensitive portrayal of young men working their way into their own uncertain future, as well as that of their home.
JUROR BIO: Kristen Gaylord is the Herzfeld Curator of Photography and Media Arts at the Milwaukee Art Museum, where she is organizing forthcoming exhibitions with Erin Shirreff and Widline Cadet. In her prior role as a curator at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, her recent projects included exhibitions Stephanie Syjuco: Double Vision (2022) and Moving Pictures: Karl Struss and the Rise of Hollywood (2024), whose catalogue won a Deutscher Fotobuchpreis. Gaylord previously held multiple curatorial roles at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she contributed to over ten exhibitions and publications, including Stephen Shore (2017); Arbus Friedlander Winogrand: New Documents, 1967 (2017); and Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015 (2015). She earned a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU.
Portait of Chloé.A
Yellow tiger on blue background
This documentary project explores coming-of-age for Taiwanese grappling with their dreams, the construction of their identity, and geopolitical events.
I visited my cousins in the aftermath of the earthquake of 2 April, 2024. In the space of a month, the island had experienced more than 1,000 aftershocks. This unusual instability of the earth echoed the diplomatic blurring of internationals relations.
This long-term project highlights the nuances and complexities of the Taiwanese situation. It follows people of different regions into adulthood including my cousin who will soon be serving in the military. I am interested in how the current political situation influences their sensibilities and the construction of identities.
MEDIUM: Photography, performance, installation. Size varying from 15x20cm to 80x120cm. Exhibition will include objects installation
© Chloé.A, Performing under a durian. Fruit considered as a weapon
© Chloé.A, Playing with a 30 year-old rocket
© Chloé.A, Four hands, red paper, turtle stone. The title of this project, ‘Yellow Tiger on Blue Background’, refers to Taiwan’s only independence flag, that of the ‘Republic of Formosa’, proclaimed in 1895. Taiwan’s current flag is still that of the Republic of China, created in 1917.
© Chloé.A, Playing Mahjong
©Chloé.A, Untitled
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![In the early morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963, four members of the United Klans of AmericaÑThomas Edwin Blanton Jr.,Herman Frank Cash, Robert Edward Chambliss, and Bobby Frank CherryÑplanted a minimum of 15 sticks of dynamite with a time delay under the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, close to the basement.
At approximately 10:22 a.m., an anonymous man phoned the 16th Street Baptist Church. The call was answered by the acting Sunday School secretary: a 14-year-old girl named Carolyn Maull. To Maull, the anonymous caller simply said the words, "Three minutes", before terminating the call. Less than one minute later, the bomb exploded as five children were present within the basement assembly, changing into their choir robes in preparation for a sermon entitled "A Love That Forgives". According to one survivor, the explosion shook the entire building and propelled the girls' bodies through the air "like rag dolls".
The explosion blew a hole measuring seven feet in diameter in the church's rear wall, and a crater five feet wide and two feet deep in the ladies' basement lounge, destroying the rear steps to the church and blowing one passing motorist out of his car. Several other cars parked near the site of the blast were destroyed, and windows of properties located more than two blocks from the church were also damaged. All but one of the church's stained-glass windows were destroyed in the explosion. The sole stained-glass window largely undamaged in the explosion depicted Christ leading a group of young children.
Hundreds of individuals, some of them lightly wounded, converged on the church to search the debris for survivors as police erected barricades around the church and several outraged men scuffled with police. An estimated 2,000 black people, many of them hysterical, converged on the scene in the hours following the explosion as the church's pastor, the Reverend John Cross Jr., attempted to placate the crowd by loudly reciting the 23rd Psalm through a bullhorn. One individual who converged on the scene to help search for survivors, Charles Vann, later recollected that he had observed a solitary white man whom he recognized as Robert Edward Chambliss (a known member of the Ku Klux Klan) standing alone and motionless at a barricade. According to Vann's later testimony, Chambliss was standing "looking down toward the church, like a firebug watching his fire".
Four girls, Addie Mae Collins (age 14, born April 18, 1949), Carol Denise McNair (age 11, born November 17, 1951), Carole Robertson (age 14, born April 24, 1949), and Cynthia Wesley (age 14, born April 30, 1949), were killed in the attack. The explosion was so intense that one of the girls' bodies was decapitated and so badly mutilated in the explosion that her body could only be identified through her clothing and a ring, whereas another victim had been killed by a piece of mortar embedded in her skull. The then-pastor of the church, the Reverend John Cross, would recollect in 2001 that the girls' bodies were found "stacked on top of each other, clung together". All four girls were pronounced dead on arrival at the Hillman Emergency Clinic.
More than 20 additional people were injured in the explosion, one of whom was Addie Mae's younger sister, 12-year-old Sarah Collins, who had 21 pieces of glass embedded in her face and was blinded in one eye. In her later recollections of the bombing, Collins would recall that in the moments immediately before the explosion, she had observed her sister, Addie, tying her dress sash.[33] Another sister of Addie Mae Collins, 16-year-old Junie Collins, would later recall that shortly before the explosion, she had been sitting in the basement of the church reading the Bible and had observed Addie Mae Collins tying the dress sash of Carol Denise McNair before she had herself returned upstairs to the ground floor of the church.](https://lenscratch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/001-16th-Street-Baptist-Church-Easter-v2-14x14-150x150.jpg)
