The Andy Warhol Foundation has just announced its 2025 Arts Writers Grant recipients — 31 writers who'll receive between $15,000 and $50,000 each to do something increasingly rare: write seriously about art.
The grants span four categories: traditional articles, books, short-form writing, and a newly added translation category. Past contributors to ARTnews and Art in America are among those selected, including Glenn Adamson, Jeremy Lybarger, Zoé Samudzi, and Catherine G. Wagley.
What's striking about this year's cohort is the scope of what they're tackling. One writer is exploring blackness in North African art. Another is examining how US visa politics have shaped which artists could enter the country — from Cold War Berlin to the post-2016 landscape. There's work on Pasifika decolonialism, on Palestinian representation, on Black feminist land art, on Mongolian resilience. These aren't safe, canonical topics. They're the conversations happening in studios and communities that don't always make it into mainstream criticism.
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Arts criticism has been quietly disappearing. As newsrooms shrink and digital advertising struggles, the infrastructure that once supported serious visual arts writing has fractured. Fewer magazines run art criticism. Fewer writers can afford to spend months on a single essay. That's where foundations like this one step in — not to replace journalism, but to protect the space where it can happen.
Joel Wachs, president of the Andy Warhol Foundation, framed it plainly: "Arts writers broadcast artists' voices far beyond gallery walls." It's true. A rigorous essay about an artist's work can reach people who'll never visit the gallery. It can contextualize what they're seeing, connect it to history and politics and lived experience. It can change how a community understands itself.
Since 2006, the foundation has supported over 450 writers with more than $13.5 million. This year's grants are part of that longer commitment — a bet that criticism itself is infrastructure worth funding.
The 2025 recipients include writers working on Mexican cinema, Arabian Sea aesthetics, Caribbean women artists, experimental education, and more. Several are translating critical texts from Portuguese, Japanese, and Spanish — making conversations from other countries available to English readers. That work of translation, of bringing voices across borders, is itself an act of criticism.
What happens next is what it always does with good writing: it circulates, it shapes how people see, it becomes part of how we understand the moment we're living in.
