The Delight Project Goes for a Guggenheim Fellowship
- Anne Pollard James
- Oct 11
- 2 min read
Updated: Oct 15
Friends, I applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship! And yesterday, I got an email that I made it to the next step. What a feeling🖤
On September 16, I clicked 'Submit' on my full application for a Guggenheim Fellowship. The project I put forward is called The Delight Project: Art & Archive. It’s a body of work about reclamation, truth, and joy as resistance. Ten monumentally scaled portraits of Oklahoma women, each paired with her voice, story, and photograph. Every participant answers the same question: What is it about your body that brings you delight?
The interviews, recordings, and documentation will live permanently in the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program at Oklahoma State University. Each painting, up to 72 by 96 inches, translates the physical and emotional presence of a woman who has chosen to define her own story on her own terms. Together, the paintings and recordings form a living record; part exhibition, part archive, part conversation.
Delight is the radical act here.
Women have been taught to see their bodies as something to correct or contain. Only ever for the gaze of others. This project refuses that. It doesn’t hide the marks, the gravity, or the strength. It turns those details into monument. The work stands as witness to women who have claimed their own narrative and decided to delight in it.
The prototype began in 2023 with smaller works — portraits of women I admire — and it’s grown into something larger than I first imagined. I’ve completed eight paintings to date, but the concept demands scale. Women need more room. The project needed more room.
I believe in the work enough to put it forward for the Guggenheim Fellowship. That act alone is its own milestone. It gave me direction for how to see the project as something that belongs in the larger dialogue of contemporary art and culture. An ethnographic exploration of art and archive.
I was sitting in the waiting room of the oil change place when I got the email that I’ve advanced to the second round of review. It feels so sweet and I want to hold onto this feeling. The joy of this moment, before it all unfolds. The energy of momentum, this rare, grounded kind that comes from knowing I’m exactly where I need to be, doing the work I’m meant to do. Whatever happens next, this is a moment worth recognizing and relishing.
Now is always the first point of what comes next. Now carries me to the next bend in the river, and I sure do love being on it.
