Image: Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, New York
The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia has announced the winners of its 2026/2027 Working Artist Project: Jessica Elaine Blinkhorn, Sonya Yong James and Marie Munk. The museum said the three artists will join the fellowship program, which is designed to support established artists in the Metropolitan Atlanta area. Evan Garza, a curator at MASS MoCA, served as guest curator for the selection.
MOCA GA’s Working Artist Project was developed in support of mid-career artists in the Atlanta area. The museum said the program is funded each year by the Charles Loridans Foundation, the AEC Trust, the Antinori Foundation, the Molly Blank Fund of the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation and additional funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. Including the artists announced this year, the program has named 57 fellows over 19 years. According to the museum, its goal is to encourage artists to remain in Atlanta and help establish the city as a place where contemporary artists can build viable careers.
The museum says the program offers a major stipend to create new work, a solo exhibition of that work, an accompanying exhibition catalog and paid studio apprentices over the course of one year. Annette Cone-Skelton, director of MOCA GA, described the initiative as one that “provides an unparalleled level of support for individual artists,” while expanding the museum’s mission and promoting Atlanta as a city where artists can live, work and thrive.
Blinkhorn is described by the museum as an interdisciplinary artist, educator, curator and disability rights advocate based in Atlanta. MOCA GA notes that she is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow and has received the Franklin Furnace Award, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, an Idea Capital Grant and numerous national artist fellowships. The museum says her work over more than two decades has investigated disability, gender, power, autonomy and the politics of care. She earned her BFA from Kennesaw State University and her MFA from Georgia State University, where she has taught since 2008.
Sonya Yong James, who lives and works in Atlanta, received a BFA from Georgia State University, where she focused on printmaking and sculpture. MOCA GA says she has exhibited nationally and internationally for the past 25 years and has received several grants, including an Artadia grant in 2019. The museum also notes that she was a nominee for the 2023 United States Artists Fellowship award. Marie Munk, an interdisciplinary artist based in Atlanta, was born in Denmark in 1988 and holds an MA from the Royal College of Art, London, earned in 2016. The museum says Munk works primarily in sculpture and large-scale installation, using industrial fabrication alongside silicone, resin, wood and 3D printing.
In a statement included with the announcement, Garza said the selection process began with eight semifinalists chosen from applicants from greater Atlanta, then narrowed to three fellows after studio visits. Garza said the final choices were guided by each artist’s capacity to articulate a vision for new work and a solo presentation in MOCA GA’s new building in Atlanta’s Westside, as well as forms of need and the ability to mentor an emerging artist and studio apprentice. Garza described Blinkhorn’s performance and interdisciplinary work as challenging assumptions about persons with disabilities, James’s textile and organic-material practice as shaped by memory, and Munk’s large-scale sculptures and interactive installations as exploring the tension between society, the human body and technology.
