Lavar Munroe, When All The World Is A Hopeless Jumble, 2022, Acrylic, spray paint, oil pastels, chalk, feathers and earrings on canvas, 50 x 77 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery.
The Estate of Robert De Niro, Sr. is thrilled to announce that Lavar Munroe is the 2023 recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s Fellowship in Fine Arts, underwritten by Robert De Niro in honor of his father, the painter Robert De Niro Sr., a Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts in 1968.
Lavar Munroe is the third recipient of the fellowship established in 2021 by Robert De Niro in collaboration with the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Lavar Munroe (b. 1982, Nassau, Bahamas) earned his BFA from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2007 and his MFA from Washington University in 2013. Munroe’s work reflects his upbringing in the Bahamas and considers themes such as resilience, memory, ancestry, and fantasy.
In 2014, Munroe was awarded a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was included in Prospect.4: The Lotus in Spite of The Swamp, the New Orleans triennial curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, and the 12th Dakar Biennale, curated by Simon Njami, in Senegal. In 2015, Munroe's work was featured in All the World's Futures, curated by Okwui Enwezor, as part of the 56th Venice Biennale.
His work has been included in museums such as the Nasher Museum of Art in Durham; Perez Art Museum, Miami; National Gallery of the Bahamas, Nassau; MAXXI Museum of Art, Rome; Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; Virginia Museum of Modern Art, Virginia Beach; Ichihara Lakeside Museum Ichihara, Japan; and The Drawing Center, New York.
Munroe was awarded residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, MacDowell Colony, the Headlands Center for the Arts, Joan Mitchell Center, Thread: Artist Residency & Cultural Center (a project of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation), a was recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant (2013). He was an inaugural Artists in Residence at the Norton Museum of Art (2020).
His work was most recently included in exhibitions at The Centre Pompidou-Metz (France), The Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (South Africa), and a solo exhibition in Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago and Jack Bell Gallery in London, both in 2023. Lavar Munroe lives and works between Baltimore, Maryland and Nassau, Bahamas.