“The 2024 Carlos Malamud Prize winner, Tenee’ Hart, will receive $10,000, as well as guidance and mentorship from the jurors. She will have a UCF Art Gallery solo exhibit in 2025 and be a member of next year’s jury.
Prize-giving can also be taste-making and trend-setting. The finalists this year were photographers, sculptors and installation artists. Hart’s installations of fiber sculpture, which she describes as “wrapped, knotted, sewn and housepaint-slathered;’ occupied corners and alcoves, softly lit with pink and lavender lighting, their organic qualities evoking domestic femininity on the surface but with a manic creepiness Undeath.
2024’s finalists are outstanding. Samuel AyeGboyin, a Florida photographer originally from Ghana, brings an unusually mature eye to portraiture, elevating Ghanaians in their everyday Jives with gorgeously lit, seemingly casual black and white compositions. Fernando Ramos photographs in color, and takes his portraiture a step further with many subjects in masks or costumes. Diego Alejandro Waisman, originally from Argentina, pursues themes of displacement in his photographs of Miami’s trailer parks, which have their own dark poetry about them. Clio Yang is a Florida-based mixed media artist; besides photography, Yang’s video installation “Blind Box” at UCF is seen through a scrim jumping with text and drawings.”