The Jacki Apple Award in Performance and Artist Projects 2024-2033

The inaugural year of the Jacki Apple Award in Performance and Artist Projects, administered by Franklin Furnace, recognizes one mid-career New York artist with a $10,000 grant to develop a major performance artwork in the city. This year, a peer panel reviewed 101 applications and selected Maria Bauman as the award recipient.

Project Description 

These are the bodies that have not borne is a multi-faceted outdoor ritual performance directed by Maria Bauman and enacted by ten Black and Brown, majority queer and transgender creatives to reimagine, heal and celebrate our wombs and the places where our wombs might be. Informed by land art, choreography, movement scores and ritual, the piece is a reckoning and a healing portal, a monument to those of us who are unresolved around not having children through our bodies. The project will premiere in Summer 2025, at Feathertail Farm, in Hudson, NY and then be shown in NYC.

Artist Biography

Maria Bauman (she/her) is a multi-disciplinary artist and community organizer from Jacksonville, FL now based in Brooklyn, NY. Bauman makes bold and honest artworks for her company MBDance, based on physical and emotional power, insistence on equity, and experiments with intimacy. She is also co-founder of undoing racism coalition ACRE (Artists Co-creating Real Equity) and a core trainer with The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, helping people on our dismantling racism journeys. The primary question guiding Bauman’s artmaking and the rest of her life is “How can we BE Together, Better?”

Bauman has recently been recognized for choreography and for dancing with two Bessie Awards, an Urban Bush Women Choreographic Center Fellowship and two Maggie Allessee National Choreographic Center residencies. She is currently the 2024-25 Alvin Ailey Artist-in-Residence, a Mertz-Gilmore/NYFA dance award recipient and the Queer Art Exchange Network ambassador artist on behalf of BAAD!.

Previously, she danced with Urban Bush Women (UBW), and was UBW’s Director of Education and Community Engagement before becoming the Associate Artistic Director. She has also danced in projects with Saul Williams, Liz Lerman, Makini Poe and Donte Beacham, Tatyana Tenenbaum, and Alethea Pace.

Award Overview: 

• Recipient: One New York City-based artist working in performance art. 
• Grant: $10,000 to fund projects in performance, media, exhibition, and/or publication.
• Requirement: Project must be completed within one year of receiving the award.
• Eligibility: The artist selected for the inaugural 2024 grant will have the added requirement of being a mid or late-career artist, including past recipients of the Franklin Furnace FUND for Performance Art.
• The selection panel will meet in July, 2024 and the award recipient will be publicly announced in October, 2024.

Application Details:

• Application Deadline: April 30, 2024, at 11:59 PM ET via Submittable.
• Franklin Furnace 2024-25 FUND info session: February 28, 7-8pm.
• Link to the Submittable application page

Jacki Apple

Jacki was an artist, an educator, a critic, an expert on performance art, and a beloved art world figure. Her collection of essays, Performance/Media/Art/Culture: Selected Essays 1983-2018 edited by Marina LaPalma was published by Intellect in 2019. More about Jacki’s life and work can be found in Artillery. Photo by Jose Mandojana.

Jacki and Franklin Furnace:

Jacki was Franklin Furnace’s curator and programs manager from 1976–1980, one of the earliest staff members. As a feminist performance artist herself, Jacki’s curatorial practice expanded into the spectrum of interdisciplinary and multi-media visual, audio, and written expression.

Franklin Furnace calendar, January-February 1977

Franklin Furnace is honored to present the inaugural Jacki Apple Award in Performance and Artist Projects, celebrating the enduring impact of Jacki Apple on the New York art scene.

This award will be an annual award given over the next ten years and reflects Jacki Apple’s commitment to championing artists, demonstrated through her multidisciplinary career as a writer, educator, radio host, and artist since the early 1980s.

The Jacki Apple Award in Performance and Artist Projects is initiated by Jacki’s sister, Marjorie Bank, along with Jeff McMahon, Deborah Oliver, Stuart Jackson-Hughes and Emily Waters. The Jacki Apple Fund is a tribute to Jacki’s lifelong dedication to NY & LA’s avant-garde art communities. Franklin Furnace and sister organization LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) will each distribute one $10,000 award per year for a total of 20 awards over the coming decade.