Caroline Kent is one of the recipients of the eleventh annual Chicago Artadia Awards. She received $10,000 in unrestricted funds and access to the ongoing benefits of the Artadia Awards program. Original Credit: Caroline Kent

As the world continues to watch numbers in hopes they come down or stay the same, two Chicago artists got to see their bank accounts go up in the amount of $10,000 thanks to winning the 2020 ChicagoArtadiaAwards. Sculptor/printmakerEliza Myrieand abstract painterCaroline Kentreceived the unrestricted funds this week as part of the national nonprofit’s 11th award cycle. The national nonprofit gives money annually to visual artists (in any medium) living within Cook County for more than two years.

Chosen from five finalists, Uptown resident Myrie garnered the LeRoy Neiman and Janet Byrne Neiman Artadia Award for her work that looks at “questions of colonialism, race, borders, pronouns, and materiality”; while Kent, a Garfield Park resident, took home the Liberty Specialty Markets Artadia Award for her “bold yet highly sophisticated explorations of the relationship between shape, line and color.”

“I was so struck by the work of the awardees Caroline Kent and Eliza Myrie, both of which tackle existing power structures and hierarchies in different and nuanced ways,” said juror Jennifer Carty, associate curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at The Smart Museum at University of Chicago, in a statement. “Both of these bodies of work feel particularly relevant to the current moment in which we live and the futures we endeavor to imagine.”

It’s the first national award for Kent, who moved to Chicago from Minneapolis three years ago. Knowing the area where George Floyd was murdered and producing work during a pandemic, Kent said her studio has become many things — a place for times of solitude, a space to feel safe and a place to create.