Welcome Fall Magnum Foundation Fellows Collin Riggins and Mateo Ruiz González
Mateo Ruiz González
Magnum Foundation is pleased to announce Collin Riggins and Mateo Ruiz González as our newest Magnum Foundation Fellows. Throughout the Fall of 2024, Collin and Mateo will split their time between supporting Magnum Foundation’s programming and pursuing their NYC-based photographic projects. A warm welcome to both!
Collin Riggins
About Collin Riggins:
Collin’s project Sites of Memory blends portraiture and landscape photography to poetically express the daily practices of intimacy, remembrance, and ongoingness that flourish from Harlem to the South Bronx. Working closely with his subjects, Collin asks “how folks leverage rapidly changing environments and, maybe more importantly, each other to feel, to remember, to mourn, to live, to remain, to transcend.” Originally from Kansas City, Missouri, Collin received a BA in African American Studies and Visual Arts from Princeton University. Collin developed an interest in photography as a teenager when he participated in a free high school photography program at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art. That moment fundamentally changed everything, inspiring Collin to not only develop his own unique photographic practice, but also champion accessibility and learning throughout that process. Today, Collin seeks to create socially engaged images that hold the spirit and sensation of black living. Although Collin sees himself working within the tradition of social documentary photography, he is always trying to challenge the genre’s aesthetics to more faithfully carry the complexity (and beauty) of black vernacular culture. In addition to being a MF Fellow, Collin is working toward the debut of his photographic project, Cotton Stains, at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in 2025. He is continuing to develop IMAG(in)E, a free film photography class for high schoolers in the Bronx that he co-created and launched last summer alongside Max Diallo Jakobsen and Majora Carter.
Mateo Ruiz González
About Mateo Ruiz González:
Mateo’s project Humble provides visual account of Bed-Stuy's Humble School of Martial Arts as a crucial community pillar amid the rapid and significant changes in Brooklyn neighborhoods. A meditation on community relations, love, discipline, urban development, displacement, the project contemplates the past and present of a community through individual efforts to navigate the balance between hope and uncertainty. Mateo is a lens-based artist and researcher from Bogota, Colombia. His work traverses the paths of documentary, fiction and fine art, capturing tensions between present realities and memory. Through his interest in cultural beliefs variables — myth and non fiction — his practice explores settings of human behavior and its emotional nexus with the land, and how time alters the relations between the two. With a background in Fine and Printed Arts, Mateo envisions his works to find a physical form through which the imagery becomes a document for study. Mateo has recently been awarded with the Creators Lab Photo Fund 2024 organized by Aperture and Google and early this year he was awarded a scholarship by Penumbra foundation to attend their 2024 Long Term Program. He completed an art residency at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY during September 2023. He was a En Foco Inc Fellowship Program fellow in 2023 and received the Silver Eye Center Fellowship 2023 special mention. Mateo is the co-founder and editor of Antics Publications, an independent photography publisher based in Bogota, Colombia and New York City, and the founder of Beginner Swimmer Works, a studio working on visual and publishing practices.
The Magnum Foundation Fellowship (also known as the NYC Work-Study Fellowship) is a program offering a project production grant, mentorship, and arts administration experience to NYC-based early-career photographers and photojournalists. This fellowship is designed for early-career photographers looking for an opportunity to deepen, expand, and complete a New York City based project that speaks to social issues in NYC communities. In addition to producing a project, fellows gain arts administration by spending two days a week working in the Magnum Foundation office. Learn more here.
The Magnum Foundation Fellowship is made possible with the support of the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation and the Select Equity Group Foundation.