Ajit Chauhan selected for the TOSA Studio Award

Now in it’s fourth year — The Tosa Studio Award recognizes a San Francisco Bay Area artist, offering financial support and a studio space to help establish and further an arts career.

Ajit Chauhan has been named the recipient of the 2019-20 TOSA Studio Award. The year long Residency provides a private studio at Minnesota Street Project and a $10,000 stipend. The Tosa Studio Award was created to help talented emerging or under-recognized artists continue to work and advance productive arts careers in the increasingly expensive Bay Area. This year’s awarded artists were chosen from a highly competitive pool of 58 applicants from nominations made by knowledgeable artists, curators and arts professionals.

Four finalists, artists Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Nicki Green, Maria Paz Gajardo Olmedo, and Dionne Lee each received a $1,000 Finalist Award. The jurors for this year’s award were Kim Anno, Bay Area artist and educator; Ed Gilbert, Owner/Director, Anglim Gilbert Gallery; and Larry Rinder, Director and Chief Curator, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

Juror Kim Anno praised the work of the awardee: “Ajit Chauhan’s work is quiet, elegant and poetic. In a time of brashness and severity it was delicate, and potent. It was a joy to award him this year’s Tosa Award.”

In Ajit Chauhan’s application, he wrote: “The idea of trying to see the extraordinary in the ordinary has always appealed to me. It’s something that can be actively cultivated. Sometimes it is the flap of a tent held back, or a cushion pushed next to the door—a poetic statement that can be reached with the simplest of means. “I think a lot about economy in the sense of doing a lot with a little—about the power of smallness and the informal, the peripheral, the unfinished. I believe the process of making something is equivalent to the process of thinking about something. Thinking takes place in your hand, on the paper, or on a keyboard as it takes place in your head. Art is preoccupied with the ways we are organized and with the possibility of reorganizing ourselves. I don’t want to solve anything necessarily but I want to see my situation somehow.”

The Tosa Studio Award will provide Ajit with a studio outside of his attic/bedroom, with a space to work, to think and to see. It will allow him to take on larger work in a variety of materials and realize ideas at a different scale. Equally important for the artist is the opportunity to join an active community of fellow creators.

Past Awardee's

2018: Indira Allegra

2017: Marcela Pardo Ariza 

2016: Sandra Ono

tosastudioaward.org