December 30, 2025
For immediate release
Kira Houston, Outreach Manager
828.350.8484 | kira@blackmountaincollege.org
Left: Portrait of Rosana Paulino. Photo by Ana Branco. | Right: Rosana Paulino, Untitled, 2025. Graphite, acrylic, and natural pigment on canvas. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center awards the 2025 Annual BMC International Artist Prize to Rosana Paulino
This annual grant of $20,000 is awarded to international or national artists working in the spirit of Black Mountain College (1933-1957).
Rosana Paulino was selected as the recipient of the $20,000 annual grant for international or national artists working in the spirit of Black Mountain College (1933-1957). This year’s committee of nominators included Beverly Adams, Johnny Gandelsman, Tina Kukielski, Helen Molesworth, and James Oles, who selected Paulino after a thorough search process across creative disciplines.
BMC Prize artists have the opportunity to develop their practice in a context that is rich with artistic and cultural significance and ongoing contemporary relevance through a guided site visit to the historic Black Mountain College campus at Lake Eden with BMCM+AC staff, transportation to Asheville, and a four-day stay to spend time at BMCM+AC, with a tour of the exhibitions and archival support at the museum and neighboring Western Regional Archives.
Origins of the Prize:
Black Mountain College (BMC) was a uniquely global college, with ideas and ideals grounded in worldviews that extend beyond the Western canon. In the same way, the legacy of the College has taken root across the globe, evolving and expanding to encompass disparate identities and forms of expression. BMCM+AC is dedicated to preserving the history of BMC as well as facilitating new work through collaboration with contemporary artists. As we advance this mission, we are privileged to have a blueprint set forth by Black Mountain College that valued the greater good, experimentation, and accountability. Funded by cultural pollinators Hedy Fischer and Randy Shull, The BMC Prize will allow BMCM+AC to continue on this path by building relationships and creating an impact with intention by supporting the creation of new work by the most innovative artists working within the BMC tradition today. The BMC Prize reflects the spirit of Black Mountain College as a place conducive to experimentation, where global social movements, communitarian efforts, and process-based practice flourished.
About the 2025 BMC Prize Recipient: Rosana Paulino
Rosana Paulino is an artist, educator, and researcher based in São Paulo, Brazil. She creates work centered around social, ethnic, and gender issues, foregrounding especially the histories, myths, narratives and images of Black women in Brazilian society. Her practice spans drawing, embroidery, engraving, printmaking, collage, sculpture, and installation. Paulino explores the history of racial violence and the persisting legacy of slavery in Brazil, illuminating the impact of memory on psychosocial constructions. She introduces archetypes and documents, blending personal and archival recollections, in order to deconstruct remnants of European colonialism which influence the cultural consciousness today.
Jeff Arnal, Executive Director of Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, remarks: “Rosana Paulino’s selection as the 2025 BMC Prize recipient extends Black Mountain College’s radical experiment across continents, recognizing a practice that, like the College itself, resists easy categories and sees art as a tool for inquiry, responsibility, and change. Paulino’s work resonates with the College’s enduring commitment to social engagement and transformative interdisciplinarity.”
Select Honors: Paulino is the recipient of the inaugural 2024 Munch Award from the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway and the 2025–2027 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice, from The Vera List Center for Arts and Politics, NY. She also received the Konex Mercosur Award in 2022. Her most recent exhibitions include Diálogos do Dia e da Noite, Mendes Wood DM, New York (2025); Novas Raízes, Casa Museu Eva Klabin, Rio de Janeiro (2024); Amefricana, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires (2024). Recent group exhibitions include Cartographies for after the end, Centre Pompidou-Metz, Metz (2025); Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2024); Ancestral, Museu de Arte Brasileira / FAAP, São Paulo (2024); 35th Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo (2023); The Milk of Dreams, 59th International Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2022); Afro-Atlantic Histories, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, (2022). Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, Centro Cultural São Paulo, Frank Museum of Art, Museu AfroBrasil, MoMA, Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Museu de Artes de Buenos Aires, Museu Oscar Niemeyer, Museu Salvador Allende, Pérez Art Museum, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Tate Modern, The Studium Museum, Harvard Art Museums and University of New Mexico Art Museum.
“What drives me is the desire to question how images, archives, and scientific devices have constructed and naturalized narratives about Black bodies, especially those of Black women, and how these narratives continue to operate within contemporary perceptions and social relations. My practice began with historical photographs, scientific reports, and colonial documents. From this material, I have developed visual and material strategies such as drawing, printmaking, digital printing on fabric, stitching, video, collage, sculpture, and installation that subvert and rearticulate these traces. Through working with these materials, I perform a symbolic gesture of repair, restoring depth, voice, and corporeality to figures once turned into “models” for racist theories, while making visible the marks of trauma and the persistence of resistance within bodies and memories. The works function through formal and poetic displacement, challenging images of scientific and mythological authority in which the trace of the body and the manual gesture become antagonistic to the rationalism that once pathologized Black lives. My practice is simultaneously research, manual craft, and pedagogic methods. By analyzing images and memories, I bring craft to the forefront as a critical language, just as BMC elevated collaborative and manual practices to the level of aesthetic and intellectual invention.”
– Rosana Paulino
About the 2024 Nominators
Beverly Adams is the Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC. Before joining MoMA, Adams was the Curator of Latin American Art at the Blanton Museum at the University of Texas at Austin. Most recently, Adams organized (with Natalia Majluf) the exhibition The Avant-garde Networks of Amauta: Argentina, Mexico, and Peru in the 1920s (2019), the catalogue for which was awarded the Association for Latin American Art Arvey Foundation Exhibition Catalogue Award. Adams holds a PhD in art history from the University of Texas at Austin.
Johnny Gandelsman is a GRAMMY® Award-winning violinist, producer, and 2024 MacArthur Fellow who blends diverse musical influences into a unique style. A founding member of Brooklyn Rider and former Silkroad Ensemble artist, he has collaborated with luminaries including Yo-Yo Ma, Béla Fleck, and Mark Morris. He is known for his invigorating new interpretations of traditional violin repertoire, including his recordings of Bach’s Sonatas & Partitas for Violin (2018) and Cello Suites Transcribed for Violin (2020), where he uses a distinct bow hold and draws inspiration from folk fiddling.
Tina Kukielski is the Susan Sollins Executive Director and Chief Curator of Art21. Since 2016, she has spearheaded the strategic expansion of the organization’s mission, curatorial vision, and program, which is dedicated to increasing public access to contemporary art and illuminating the creative practices of the most important artists working today. Internationally recognized for its Peabody Award-winning documentary series Art in the Twenty-First Century, Art21 has grown under Kukielski’s tenure as a leader in arts education and a pioneering producer of online film and digital media, with an annual viewership of over 4 million. Prior to Art21, Kukielski worked for over 13 years as a curator of contemporary art, holding curatorial positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Carnegie Museum of Art. She was a co-curator of the 2013 Carnegie International.
Helen Molesworth is a writer, podcaster, and curator. She previously held positions at the ICA Boston, Wexner Center for the Arts, and Harvard Art Museum. In 2015 she organized Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957, the first comprehensive museum exhibition on the subject of Black Mountain College to take place in the U.S.. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Journal, Documents, and October; and in 2023 she published Open Questions: Thirty Years of Writing About Art (Phaidon). She hosts DIALOGUES, a podcast with David Zwirner, and also hosted the podcast series Death of an Artist (Pushkin). Past awards include the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies Award for Curatorial Excellence (2011), Guggenheim Fellowship (2021), and The Clark Art Writing Prize (2022).
James Oles teaches art history at Wellesley College and is adjunct curator of Latin American Art at the Davis Museum. He splits his time between Wellesley, MA and Mexico City, where he works as an independent curator and art historian. His previous books include South of the Border: Mexico in the American Imagination, 1914-1947 (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993) and Art and Architecture in Mexico (Thames & Hudson, 2013). Recent exhibition projects include “Diego Rivera’s America” which traveled to SFMoMA and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (2022-2023), and “Mexichrome: Color and Photography in Mexico” at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City (2023). Oles holds a PhD from Yale University.
Founded in 1933, Black Mountain College was one of the leading experimental liberal art schools in America until its closure in 1957. After the Bauhaus in Germany closed due to mounting antagonism from the Nazi Party, Josef and Anni Albers readily accepted an offer to join the Black Mountain College faculty. During their 16-year tenure in North Carolina, the Alberses helped model the college’s interdisciplinary curriculum on that of the Bauhaus, attracting an unmatched roster of teachers and students including R. Buckminster Fuller, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Mary Caroline (M.C.) Richards, and Robert Rauschenberg.
The Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (BMCM+AC) was founded in 1993 to celebrate the history of Black Mountain College as a forerunner in progressive interdisciplinary education and to celebrate its extraordinary impact on modern and contemporary art, dance, theater, music, and performance.
The museum is committed to educating the public about the history of Black Mountain College and promoting awareness of its extensive legacy through exhibitions, publications, lectures, films, seminars, and oral histories. Through our permanent collection, special exhibitions, publications, and research archive, we provide access to historical materials related to the college and its influence on the field.
BMCM+AC provides a forum for multifaceted programming in a dynamic environment in downtown Asheville, North Carolina. Our goal is to provide a gathering point for people from a variety of backgrounds to interact – integrating art, ideas, and discourse.
Portrait of Rosana Paulino by Rodrigo Ladeira. | Rosana Paulino, Brazilian geometry: verde n.2, 2022. Collage, monotype and painting on canvas. Photo courtesy of the artist. | Rosana Paulino, Untitled, 2025. Graphite, acrylic, and natural pigment on canvas. Photo courtesy of the artist. | Rosana Paulino, Paradisiac Muse, 2019. Digital printing on fabric, ink and sewing. Photo courtesy of the artist.