The Rollins Museum of Art and the UCF Art Gallery at the University of Central Florida are pleased to announce the finalists for the second iteration of their collaborative exhibition and competition for emerging Florida artists, Pathways 2024: The Carlos Malamud Prize.

The competition, which takes place biannually, considers applications by artists who reside in Florida, are beginning their careers, and have not yet had solo exhibitions at a museum or major gallery.

A selection of finalists (this year, seven) are chosen by a board of jurors to then group-exhibit together in the summer, split between two exhibition spaces at RMA and UCF. This year, the group exhibition will open May 30, 2024. From there, an overall winner will then be selected for the competition’s grand reward: a $10,000 cash prize, a solo exhibition at the UCF Art Gallery in the fall of 2025, a consulting session with a financial advisor (to discuss the financial aspects of a sustainable art practice), and a juror position for the next Pathways competition.

The exhibition is supported in part by the Pabst-Steinmetz Foundation; the funding for the prize is generously provided by Mr. Carlos Malamud of Miami, FL.

This year’s three jurors are:

• Ginger Gregg Duggan, the founding partner of c2 – curatorsquared, which develops exhibitions of international, cross-media contemporary art and design that explore current cultural issues

• Dennis Scholl, a visual artist, contemporary art collector, and award-winning documentary filmmaker focusing on arts and culture

• Eugene Ofori Agyei, the Ghana-born, currently New York-based artist and winner of the Pathways 2022: Carlos Malamud Prize

This year’s seven Pathways 2024: The Carlos Malamud Prize finalists are:

• Jonathan Sanchez Noa (Cuban, b. 1994)

• Samuel Aye-Gboyin (Ghanaian, b. 1991)

• Patricia L. Cooke (American, b. 1988)

• Tenee’ Hart (American, b. 1988)

• Diego Alejandro Waisman (Argentinian American, b. 1979)

• Fernando Ramos (American, b. 1994)

• Clio Yang (Chinese, b. 1997)

While the Pathways competition is still young, in just two years it has proven to us that there exists a great quantity, quality, and diversity of artists practicing in the state of Florida. It has both advanced the careers of finalists and its winner alike, and, no less importantly, has exposed all involved to great talent.

Eugene Ofori Agyei, winner of the Pathways 2022: Carlos Malamud Prize, remarks: “The prize was a great honor. Looking at the trajectory in my career and being young in the game, I’m grateful for what is happening and for how much progress I have been able to make after receiving the award.”

Consistent engagement over time is what makes Pathways unique and transformative among other art competitions. It hopes to nurture emerging artists and provide a “pathway” to success, which ultimately coincides with the core missions of both presenting institutions.

We look forward to extending more details about the summer group exhibition featuring this year’s finalists very soon. The show will include a variety of media, themes, scales, and approaches. Learn more about the artists and jurors here:

FINALISTS | PATHWAYS 2024: CARLOS MALAMUD PRIZE

Diego Waisman

Buenos Aires–born, Miami-based Diego Waisman is a visual artist who explores themes of social and economic displacement, identity, and exile. Waisman utilizes documentary photography, video, and installation to build connected narratives about overlooked social topics. He holds an animation degree from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, a bachelor’s in studio art from the University of Miami and an MFA from Florida International University. In 2022, Waisman received the Green Space grant, which funded and exhibited his installation This Community, and the 30th Annual Emerald Coast National Best-in-Show, organized by Northwestern Florida State College. In 2023, he participated in the Urban History Association’s 10th Biennial, where he presented a paper on his recent research and creative work around issues of affordable housing in South Florida. He is a Ratcliffe Art + Design Incubator fellow and has received an arts scholarship from the Berkowitz Contemporary Foundation and the Faena Art Curatorial Studies Scholarship. His first monograph, Sunset Colonies, will be released by the University Press of Florida in Fall 2024.

Patricia L. Cooke

Patricia L. Cooke was born and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina. She earned her BFA in 2011 from Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. In 2015, Cooke was awarded a Graduate Teaching Assistant Scholarship from the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida where she earned her MFA in Sculpture in 2018. Cooke currently holds the position of Lecturer in Sculpture at the University of Miami. Cooke lives and works in North Miami Beach, Florida with her loving partner Wade and three cats.

Clio Yang

Clio Yang (she/they) is a filmmaker, video artist and film educator who actively engages her multiple cultural background while negotiating a unique identity that calls into question the very idea of media representation. She takes a generalist approach that includes cinematography, photography, writing, sound, and video editing. A lesbian woman born and raised in Jinan, China, and the first in her family to attend college in the U.S., she portrays disconnections and displacement, but also love and reconciliation in her queer experience that straddles East Asian and American languages and cultures. She points focus to socio-economic issues faced by marginalized groups in her communities, like those in Florida, and among foreigners and Chinese in the South. Projects she worked on have been screened at Florida Film Festival, Athena Film Festival, Global Peace Film Festival, South East European Film Festival LA, and so on. She established her film production knowledge and skills by working under an industry setting as well as a micro-budget independent setting, across narrative, documentary, and experimental. Clio graduated magna cum laude from Barnard College of Columbia University with a Film Studies BA. She is currently a film lecturer teaching post-production and screenwriting at University of Central Florida, where she earned her feature film production MFA with documentary “And They Saved My Sorry Ass”.

Samuel Aye-Gboyin

Samuel Aye-Gboyin is an artist who works in various mediums such as design, photography, video, and animation and is currently an MFA candidate in Art and Technology at the School of Art and Art History, University of Florida. Samuel received his master’s degree with an emphasis in Graphic Design from Eastern Illinois University in 2021, in addition to his bachelor’s degree in communication design with a concentration in animation and motion graphics from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science & Technology in 2018. Samuel utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to his work using these mediums to track what is happening today. Be it his frame-to-frame animation technique or compelling monochrome images, he investigates the topics of commerce, migration, globalization, and hybridity. His work bears witness to the ever-evolving conversation between the fleeting realms and the parallel worlds that coexist.

Tenee’ Hart

Tenee’ Hart is an ‘unconventional’ fiber sculpture artist pursuing themes of feminism that delve into topics of beauty, anatomy, and the inequality of women. Wrapped fibers, gushing forms, and the manipulation of the  ‘everyday’ are crucial components within Hart’s works. Her abstract forms remain committed to an intriguing physicality that comes from palpable and intentional material usage. Hart hails from Virginia, where she received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Mary Washington in 2011. Later, Hart earned her Masters of Fine Arts degree from Florida State University, where she has been teaching, at the college level, since the completion of her degree in 2015. Hart is currently the Co-Head of ODL for FSU | Department of Art. Beyond her role as an educator, Hart is the sole Graduate Advisor and Coordinator for the Department of Art at Florida State University.

Jonathan Sánchez Noa

Jonathan Sánchez Noa was born in Havana, Cuba and now lives in Florida. He creates artworks that examine how histories of colonial extractivism have impacted notions of race, identity and climate. Jonathan earned his BFA from The Cooper Union in 2020, and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2023. Recent exhibitions of his work include Once, Cleve Carney Museum of Art, Chicago, IL (2023); Rastros en el tiempo at The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center, New York, NY (2022); and Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling at Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark (2021).

Fernando Ramos

Fernando Ramos is a queer Latin American artist born in Miami, Florida and currently lives and works in Miami, Florida. Ramos received an Associate in the Arts from Miami Dade College. Selected group exhibition includes inaugural exhibit SPACE, 2023, Cape Center Cape in Canaveral, FL; 92nd Annual Online Juried Open Exhibition, 2023, National Arts League, New York, New York; Connections Online Juried Open Exhibition, 2023, Collage Artists of America, Studio City, California. Ramos Received Best in Show at the Beaux Arts Festival Held by the Lowe Museum in Miami, Florida (2011 & 2012) as well as Best in Show at the Coconut Grove Woman’s Club 9th Annual Young Artists’ Gallery in Coconut Grove FL (2011), Merit Award Winner at the 92nd Annual Online Juried Open Exhibition.

JURORS | PATHWAYS 2024: CARLOS MALAMUD PRIZE

Eugene Ofori Agyei

Eugene Ofori Agyei is an artist and educator originally from Ghana who lives in the United States. He is the winner of the Pathways 2022: Carlos Malamud Prize. Eugene graduated from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana, with a BA in Industrial Art, majoring in Ceramics, in 2018. Prior to his MFA at the University of Florida, he was assigned as a teaching and research assistant at the same school where he received his BA for one year. Eugene is the 2020/2021 recipient of the University of Florida Grinter Fellowship award, the 2022 Artaxis Fellowship award, and the Harold Garde Graduate Studio Art award. He was the 2021 Zenobia awardee at the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts and gleaned Best of Show from The In Art Gallery’s social change and open theme exhibition. He has shown his work extensively across the US. Agyei was also awarded the National Council on Education for Ceramic Arts Graduate Student Fellowship and the National Council on Education for Ceramic Arts Multicultural Fellowship in 2022. He has been in residence at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, Maine, and the Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts, Newcastle, Maine. In April 2022, the Morean Arts Center named him one of its Fresh Squeezed 6: Emerging Artists in Florida. Agyei is the recipient of the Robert Chapman Turner Teaching Fellowship at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University.

Ginger Gregg Duggan

Ginger Gregg Duggan is a founding partner of c2 – curatorsquared. Together with Judith Hoos Fox they develop exhibitions of international, cross-media contemporary art and design that explore current cultural issues. Duggan earned her advanced degree at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia. She has held curatorial positions at institutions including the former Museum of Contemporary Art, Lake Worth, Florida; the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Florida: and the former Bellevue Art Museum, Washington. From 2005-2008 Duggan and Fox were visiting curators at the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since they formalized their partnership in 2008, they have co-organized exhibitions for BSA Space|Boston Society of Architects; Design Museum Holon, Israel; Pratt Manhattan Gallery, Pratt Institute, New York; Tufts University Art Gallery, Medford, Massachusetts; the Ulrich Museum, Wichita State University, Kansas; Georgetown University Galleries, Washington, D.C.; the Cecile and Ezra Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut and the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design. Many of these exhibitions have traveled throughout the United States and abroad.

Dennis Scholl

Dennis Scholl is a visual artist, a twenty-two time regional Emmy winner for his work in cultural documentaries, and a collector of contemporary art for over four decades. He and his wife Debra built one of the largest private collections of Aboriginal Australian art in the U.S. Recently, they donated 200 works from their collection as a joint gift to The Met, the Nevada Museum of Art, and the Frost Art Museum in Miami. Over the last 20 years, Scholl created a series of initiatives dedicated to building the contemporary art collections of museums, including the Guggenheim, the Tate Modern, and Perez Art Museum Miami, which resulted in hundreds of patron-funded art acquisitions. He has served on the boards and executive committees of the Aspen Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, Perez Art Museum Miami, ArtPlace, South Arts, the Detroit Institute of Art, and the Linda Pace Foundation.

About The Rollins Museum Of Art

The Rollins Museum of Art features rotating exhibitions, ongoing programs, and an extensive permanent collection of over 6,000 objects that spans centuries, from examples of ancient art and artifacts to contemporary art. Open to the public year-round, its holdings include the only European Old Master paintings in the Orlando area, a sizeable American art collection, and a forward-thinking contemporary collection on view both at the Museum and The Alfond Inn at Rollins. Located a few blocks from campus, The Alfond Inn is a visionary philanthropic boutique hotel whose proceeds help fund student scholarships. In 1981, the museum became Florida’s first accredited college museum by the American Association of Museums (currently the American Alliance of Museums) and continues today as one of only four AAM-accredited museums in greater Orlando. For additional information, call (407) 646-2526 or visit www.rollins.edu/rma. “Like” the RMA on Facebook and follow on Instagram @rollinsmuseum.

About Rollins College

Founded in 1885, Rollins College is Florida’s oldest recognized college. Located in Winter Park, near Orlando, Rollins is consistently ranked as one of the top regional universities in the South by U.S. News & World Report. In addition to full-time undergraduate programs in the College of Liberal Arts, Rollins offers undergraduate and graduate degree programs for working adults through its evening program at the Hamilton Holt School and graduate business degree programs through its Crummer Graduate School of Business, which has been ranked a top MBA program by Forbes and Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Rollins serves approximately 3,127 degree-seeking students annually. For more information, visit www.rollins.edu. “Like” Rollins on Facebook and follow on Twitter @RollinsCollege.

Photo Credit: The Rollins Museum of Art and Rollins College

Date Posted: February 15, 2024