Alan W. Moore, a frequent contributor to post.thing.net, has received a 2012 Arts Writers Grant for his Art Squats book.

This was announced yesterday, December 3, in a press release from Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation.

The Arts Writers Grant Program is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2012 grant.

Designed to encourage and reward writing about contemporary art that is rigorous, passionate, eloquent, and precise, as well as to create a broader audience for arts writing, the Arts Writers Grant Program aims to strengthen the field as a whole and to ensure that critical writing remains a valued mode of engaging the visual arts.

In its 2012 cycle, the program has awarded a total of $623,500 to twenty-one writers. Ranging from $8,000 to $50,000 in four categories—articles, blogs, books and short-form writing—these grants support projects addressing both general and specialized art audiences, from scholarly studies to self-published blogs.

And this in particular on Art Squats:

Providing a backdrop for artists’ involvement in the global Occupy movement, Art Squats will offer an art historical examination—written from both personal experience and empirical research—of the important roles artists play in the decades-old occupation movements in Europe and the US. Structured in two parts, the book will first cover artists whose work inspired the author to research squatting, including many involved in the New York City squatting movement of the 1980s—Seth Tobocman, Fly, Andrew Castrucci, and Eric Drooker, and collectives like Colab, ABC No Rio, World War III Illustrated, the Rivington School, and PAD/D—as well as a more recent wave of politicized artists and groups with connections to the global justice movement, such as 16 Beaver Group, Not an Alternative, Just Seeds, Basekamp, Red 76, and Baltimore Development Cooperative. The second portion of the book will be an empirical study of European art squats in cities including Madrid, Paris, Berlin, Hamburg, London, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen, based on material from the annual zine produced by the author, House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence (2009–2013), and the experiences and writings of the militant research group SqEK (Squatting Europe Kollective).

Alan W. Moore worked with the artists’ group Colab and helped start the cultural center ABC No Rio in New York City. After a stint as a critic, he made video art and installations from the mid-1970s on, and in the early 1990s went back to school to study art history. He has written on artists’ groups, cultural districts, and cultural economies. He is the author of Art Gangs: Protest and Counterculture in New York City (Autonomedia, 2011), and has contributed chapters to Alternative Art NY (edited by Julie Ault) (University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Collectivism after Modernism (edited by Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette) (University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Resistance: A Political History of the Lower East Side (edited by Clayton Patterson) (Seven Stories Press, 2006). He runs the House Magic information project on self-organized, occupied social centers. He lives in Madrid.