Congratulations to Vonnie “Quest” Smith for being selected for the MFA Art Prize. The prize is a $2000 gift from the graduate committee selected by an outside curator.
This year our guest curator was Amy L. Powell, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Krannert Art Museum in Champaign, IL.
Amy L. Powell on Vonnie Quest for the MFA Art Prize: “Vonnie Quest’s work advances a loving and layered aesthetic. His five-minute video Meditation on Migration / Opportunity Zone tracks narratives of Black American movement and experiences of discriminatory development in Milwaukee by using found footage, voiceover, and visible signs of his research process. Quest’s videos, photographic collages, and interventions with text offer multiplicity: overlaying family photo albums with city scenes and the kitchen table, for instance, but also by ensuring room for the spaces between images, and for what goes unsaid. Quest’s work communicates his clear position as someone within and committed to community. Complex and moving, Quest’s work honors how knowledge is shared through generations.”