Jiha Moon, Lecturer of Drawing and Painting at the Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design in the College of the Arts at Georgia State University, has been awarded a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Fine Arts. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has recognized artists, writers and researchers “who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts” since 1925. Moon was selected as one of 171 fellowship winners out of 3,000 applicants.
“It is incredibly rewarding to see Professor Moon’s achievements recognized and lauded by the prestigious Guggenheim Foundation and we couldn’t agree more with their assessment,” shared Michael White, Director of the School of Art & Design. “As part of our Welch School of Art & Design family for the past three years, Jiha has been a dynamic colleague, instructor, and role model for our students. This notable external recognition of her impressive career growth and trajectory confirms our continued focus on both faculty and student success.”
Moon is the third faculty member at the Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design to receive this prestigious award alongside Emerita Professor Nancy Floyd in 2022 and current Professor Craig Drennen in 2018.
Yellowave (Stranger Yellow), 2021, ink and acrylic on Hanji mounted on canvas; 60 x 120 in.
Jiha Moon (b. 1973) is from DaeGu, Korea and lives and works in Atlanta, GA. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa, Iowa City. Her works have been acquired by Asia Society, New York, NY, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, The Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC, Smithsonian Institute, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro, NC and The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA. She has had solo exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, GA, Taubman Museum, Roanoke, VA, the Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC, The Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville, TN and Rhodes College, Clough-Hanson Gallery, Memphis, TN and James Gallery of CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY. She has been included in group shows at Kemper Museum, Kansas City, MI, the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA, the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA, Asia Society, New York, NY, The Drawing Center, New York, NY, White Columns, New York, NY, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA, and the Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro, NC. She is recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s Painter and Sculptor’s award for 2011. Her mid-career survey exhibition, “Double Welcome: Most everyone’s mad here” organized by Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art and Taubman Museum has toured more than 10 museum venues around the country until 2018.
Moon gestural paintings, mixed media, ceramic sculpture and installation explore fluid identities and the global movement of people and their cultures. She takes cues from wide ranges of history of Eastern and Western art, colors and designs from popular culture, Korean temple paintings and folk art, internet emoticons and icons, fruit stickers and labels of products globally. She often teases and changes these lexicons so that they are hard to identify, yet stay in a familiar zone. Her practice is vibrant and multi-disciplinary, and she creates seamlessly across the mediums of drawing and painting to ceramic and three-dimensional forms. While her work has been nationally recognized and acclaimed for years, she has enjoyed recent praise and spotlights from publications such as Hyperallergic, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. She is represented by Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami, Derek Eller in New York and Laney Contemporary in Savannah.
Once upon a time 2022, Porcelain, underglaze, glaze; 12.5″ x 9″ x 7″ 21 / 35.
Since its establishment in 1925, the Foundation has granted more than $360 million in Fellowships to more than 18,000 individuals, among whom are scores of Nobel laureates, Fields Medalists, poets laureate, members of the various national academies, and winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Turing Award, National Book Awards and other important, internationally recognized honors. The Foundation’s aim is to “add to the educational, literary, artistic, and scientific power of this country.”
For more information on the Fellows and their projects, please visit the Foundation’s website at www.gf.org. For more information about Jiha Moon’s work, visit jihamoon.com