Tanja Softic

Tanja Softic, associate professor of art at the University of Richmond, has received a $22,000 grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation to support her work on “Migrant Universe,” a series of large-scale art pieces.

The Pollock-Krasner Foundation assists artists who have worked professionally over a significant period of time. 

Softic will work on her project this fall at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, which awarded her a fellowship for a residency at its Amherst, Va., retreat.

“Migrant Universe” is a series of 18 mixed media works on paper that form “visual cantos” of one, two or three panels laterally joined together. “The series addresses factors of cultural hybridity that shape the identity and world view of an immigrant: exile, longing, translation and memory,” said Softic, who is an immigrant herself, having come to the United States from Bosnia. “In Migrant Universe, the drawings function as a re-arrangeable continuum of maps, landscapes and portraits of memory and identity,” she said.