Wasserman awarded a Creative Capital Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant

via KNOE

Andrew Wasserman, an assistant professor of art and architecture history in Louisiana TechUniversity’s School of Design, has been awarded a Creative Capital Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

Wasserman is one of 20 writers to earn this grant award, which is designed to support writing about contemporary art. The grant will support research on Wasserman’s forthcoming book, “Bang! We’re All Dead! The Places of Nuclear Fear in 1980s America.”

Wasserman’s book investigates public art in American cities born of a culture of nuclear fear between 1979 and 1991, when artists responded to the compromised personal security brought about by nuclear weaponry and nuclear energy. The study moves between the gallery and the street, the bomb and the reactor, and the home front and the global military theater.

Contextualized by Cold War anxieties, atomic end-of-the-world fantasies, Reagan-era defense spending increases and public health concerns, Wasserman’s research recuperates the works of overlooked artists as central to an understudied facet of contemporary American experience.

The Creative Capital Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant issues awards in four categories: articles, blogs, books and short-form writing projects. The program’s aim is to strengthen the field of art writing and ensure that critical writing remains a value mode of engaging the visual arts.