The 2023 Toni Beauchamp Prize in Critical Art Writing Winner's Event

Join us on Thursday April 11th at 7 pm at Basket Books for a conversation with 2023 Beauchamp prize winner Constance Collier-Mercado and art writer Raphael Rubinstein moderated by Gulf Coast Guest Art Editor Lauren Cross.

Lauren Cross is a interdisciplinary artist/filmmaker, curator, and scholar whose work has been screened and exhibited across the country. Cross earned her BA (2006) in Art, Design, and Media from Richmond, the American International University in London, England, and her MFA (2010) in Visual Arts from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. She has a Ph.D in Multicultural Women's and Gender Studies from Texas Woman's University in Denton, TX (2017).

Constance Collier-Mercado is an experimental writer and artist whose work examines nuance within dialectical, multilingual, and equivocal spaces. Consumed by ideas of global Blackness as polyamorous Church, she weaves this aesthetic into her practice via an irreverent blk feminine divine. Constance has received Fellowships from Baldwin for the Arts, MacDowell, The Stay at Nearview, The Periplus Collective, The Watering Hole, Kimbilio, The Hambidge Center, and Jack Jones Literary Arts. Her writing has been published in the African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta (ADAMA) blog, Obsidian, Hennepin Review, Root Work Journal, The Believer, Kweli Journal, and elsewhere.

Raphael Rubinstein is a New York-based writer and art critic whose numerous books include The Miraculous (Paper Monument, 2014) and A Geniza (Granary Books, 2015). He edited the anthology Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of their Practice and is widely known for his articles on “provisional painting.” His poetry has appeared in, among other places, Grand Street, Fence and Harper’s Magazine and in Best American Poetry 2015. From 1997 to 2007 he was a senior editor at Art in America, where he continues to be a contributing editor. In 2002, the French government presented him with the award of Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters. In 2010, his blog The Silo won a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. In 2014 The Silo was given a Best Blog Award of Excellence by the International Association of Art Critics. His column of micro-narratives “The Miraculous: New York” appears monthly in The Brooklyn Rail.