Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW) and The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) have announced the recipients of the Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Art Grants (AWAW EAG) program, which provides one-time grants of up to $20,000 to support environmental art projects led by women-identifying artists from the United States and U.S. territories. In the 2023 cycle, the second year of the program, a total of $309,000 in grant funding was awarded to 20 projects that will focus on environmental issues and advocacy in locations including Belize, Southern Iraq, Mongolia, New York, Pennsylvania, Tierra del Fuego, West Virginia, and Washington. The 20 projects were selected from 884 applications from artists who reside in the United States and U.S. Territories.
Meridel Rubenstein’s Eden in Iraq Wastewater Garden Project: Inanna Returns to the Marshes as a Mosaic (El-Chibayish, Southern Iraq) will bring ceramic relief tiles referencing Inanna, the Mesopotamian Goddess of Flood and Fertility, to the three main arched entrances of the Eden in Iraq Wastewater Garden in Southern Iraq. Rubenstein imagines the feminine earth-based tile imagery mitigating the 20 year-old effect of the US war effort in Iraq, like the garden flora cleaning waste.