We are excited to announce the recipients of the first-ever Emerging Artist Fellowship!

BEX YA YOLK (they/them) is a transdisciplinary visual artist, book maker, scholar, and professor. yolk runs an independent artists’ book bindery, THUNGRY founded in Atlanta, GA now residing in Chicago, IL. With a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a full merit scholar—yolk has received grant endowment and recognition from the Atlanta Contemporary, the College Book Art Association, and the Judith Alexander Foundation.

To date, THUNGRY operates as a publishing initiative focused on disrupting what we’ve come to understand qualifies a Book, complicating traditional ways of book building + semantics, through experimentation and queering praxis. yolk also maintains an extensive, generative, multi-year research study into the 'maternal complex', made up of subgenres like mothernism, the maternal identity, care work, reproductive design, rematriation, reproductive justice, container technics, matrescence, and the gestational state especially in queer folx exploring the intersectionalities between the Book + this kind of body.

POKEWEED COLLECTIVE represents the work of book, print and zine artists Katharine Buckley (Contoura Press), Gina Louise Fowler (The Puzzled Press), Millicent Krebs (MCK Press), Irasema Quezada (Corazon Design Studio) and Jillian Sico (Frogsong Press). All recipients of (or current candidates for) an MFA in Book Arts from The University of Alabama, the collective is bound by interest in exploring the overlap between form and content in artists' books and in the use of experimental print- and papermaking.

Applications to the Emerging Artist Fellowship are now closed

Thank you to all applicants! 

Determinations will be sent/announced July 15, 2023.

The CODEX Emerging Artist Fellowships aim to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion in the world of book arts by helping to reduce the financial barriers to exhibiting at the CODEX Book Fair. The fellowships are meant for emerging artists from backgrounds that are under-represented in the field.

Each recipient of the fellowship receives a grant for the cost of one full table for one CODEX fair, and then a second grant for half of one full table at the following CODEX fair. There will be two fellowships available to attend the 2024 CODEX IX Book Fair & Symposium.

The CODEX Emerging Artist Fellowships are community-supported grants with additional funding from the CODEX Foundation.

Special thanks to Aaron Cohick for organizing and facilitating this opportunity with the CODEX Foundation.

The jury includes: 
Islam Aly
Julie Chen
Nancy Loeber
Dina Pollack
Keri Miki-Lani Schroeder