LEWIS BALTZ RESEARCH FUND #12

Laureate LBRF #12 – ANDY SEWELL

The Lewis Baltz Research Fund #12 is awarded to Andy Sewell for the projet To Organize a Together.

Andy Sewell will use this award to build on the themes and visual language of his recent works — Known and Strange Things Pass (2021) and Slowly and Then All at Once (2025) — surfacing the ways different forms of power shape our increasingly unstable world and asking how we might organise to find ways around current blockages, deal with the unfolding collapse of our political and ecological systems, and make hope normal again.

This new work brings together short films and still-image sequences showing individuals and groups working to change their communities in ways that make life better, from Tottenham Family Fightback in London to the rise of the Green Party in England and Zohran Mamdani’s movement in New York.

Developing the cinematographic language of previous works, the installation combines moving image, still photography, and sound across multiple small screens arranged as a network, a kind of mycelium of efforts and communities. Viewers move among fragments that express both the personal and the universal. Voices of participants responding to questions about what works, what fails, what brings joy and hope come together to form the sound of a crowd.

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Andy Sewell’s work uncovers feelings of immersion, fragility, interconnection, and possibility. It addresses power, questions assumed boundaries, and looks at the relationships between the ideas we hold about the world and our embodied experience of it. His work brings into relation things we often think of as separate; the ocean and the internet, for example, in Know and Strange Things Pass, and different forms of power involved in the ongoing ecological crisis — top-down and the bottom up, human and the more than human — in Slowly and then All at Once.

His work can be found in the collections of the V&A Museum, Tate Gallery, MAST Foundation, Columbia University Art Collection and the Museum of London, among others. He has been the subject of solo shows in USA, France, Italy, Poland, Germany, China, and South Korea and has been nominated for Oskar Barnack Award, Prix Pictet, and the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. He is the winner of the International Photobook Award.