Felt portrait artist Melissa Joseph awarded UOVO Prize.
Portrait of Melissa Joseph, 2024. Photo by Miguel McSongwe. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.
Melissa Joseph, a Brooklyn-based artist who uses felting techniques to make intimate portraits, has been awarded the UOVO Prize by the Brooklyn Museum. The award includes a solo exhibition at the museum, a large-scale public mural commission, and a $25,000 unrestricted cash grant. This recognition comes on the heels of Joseph’s inclusion in The Artsy Vanguard 2025.
The UOVO Prize, supported by UOVO—a company specializing in the storage of valuable collectibles—aims to promote the work of Brooklyn-based artists. Previous recipients include filmmaker Suneil Sanzgiri in 2023 and Artsy Vanguard 2022 alum Oscar yi Hou in 2022.
As part of the prize, Joseph will create a 50-by-50-foot mural on the facade of UOVO’s facility in Bushwick, Brooklyn and an installation at the Brooklyn Museum’s Iris Cantor Plaza. Both pieces will reference the intricate designs of Italy’s Siena Cathedral and are scheduled to be unveiled in June 2025.
“For this project, I chose to reference the incredible floors of the Siena Cathedral and to think about the way public art has functioned throughout history,” said Joseph in a press statement. “While the process and purpose of creating public art have both expanded and accelerated, the potential for profound human connection remains, and that is what most excites and inspires me about this project.”
Joseph was selected by a team of Brooklyn Museum curators from the artists featured in “The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition,” a major group show of local artists organized in celebration of the museum’s 200th anniversary. Joseph’s contribution to the exhibition, which is on view until January 26, 2025, is Olive’s Hair Salon (2023), a felt portrait of her brother and young niece. Last year, the museum acquired her piece Getting Reuben’s tuition book (2023).
Over the last year, Joseph’s work has been featured in a number of notable exhibitions and fair presentations. In November 2023, she had a solo show at New York’s Margot Samel. This June, the gallery presented Joseph’s work in a solo booth at Liste Art Fair Basel. At Art Basel Miami Beach earlier this month, New York gallery Charles Moffett mounted a dual presentation featuring Joseph and Kim Dacres, which was selected as one of Artsy’s top 10 booths from the fair.
