Transdisciplinary artist and educator Ginger Brooks Takahashi has been awarded the 2022 Ida Applebroog Grant from The Cooper Union School of Art. The juried $10,000 award is given to an under-recognized artist whose work demonstrates high artistic merit while consistently challenging artistic conventions.  

Ginger Brooks Takahashi’s socially engaged practice combines performance, installation, and site-responsive works, and is an extension of feminist spaces and queer inquiry. Her art questions our surroundings, our resources, and how we might creatively co-exist. Brooks Takahashi currently resides in Pittsburgh and that city’s relationship to the steel industry heavily influences her work as do similar issues of environmental racism and food justice. A 2021 installation, “Nine Mile Run Viewfinder,” part of Pittsburgh’s Office of Public Art’s Environment, Health, and Public Art Initiative, brought attention to the connections between Nine Mile Run, a small watershed located in Pittsburgh's East End, the city’s stormwater and sewer systems, the local Monongahela River, and the water we drink. She is currently developing a permanent public artwork for Schenley Park, one of Pittsburgh’s largest municipal parks.

“The Ida Applebroog Grant will significantly help me with research into my new project, Perilla People, which examines the complex colonial relationships between Japanese and Korean people through the expanded context of a culinary herb,” says Brooks Takahashi. “I’m so honored to be chosen as the recipient for the 2022 Ida Applebroog Award.”

“The Cooper Union hopes this recognition will help Ginger Brooks Takahashi, an artist whose work has always challenged preconceived notions of gender and sexuality, as she continues to expand her practice into works confronting the growing crisis of climate breakdown,” says Mike Essl, Dean of The Cooper Union School of Art. “Our thanks to the nominators and review panelists for their time and consideration in selecting this year’s Ida Applebroog grantee.”

Brooks Takahashi, who graduated from Oberlin College and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program, is the co-founder of the feminist genderqueer artist collective and art journal, LTTR, as well as General Sisters, a collaboration with Dana Bishop-Root. An adjunct professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University, her work has been shown widely at institutions including Carnegie Museum of Art, Oakland Museum of California, the Brooklyn Museum, and the New Museum. She has received MacDowell and New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, and has held residencies at Smack Mellon Studio, Center for Book Arts, and more.