CAA News Today

CAA announces today the recipients of its 2010 Awards for Distinction. These annual awards honor outstanding achievements in the visual arts and reaffirm CAA’s mission to encourage the highest standards of scholarship, practice, and teaching.

CAA President Paul B. Jaskot will formally recognize the honorees and present the awards at Convocation, to be held during CAA’s 98th Annual Conference on Wednesday evening, February 10, 2010, 5:30–7:00 PM, at the Hyatt Regency Chicago. The Annual Conference—hosting scholarly sessions, panel discussions, career-development workshops, art exhibitions, a book and trade fair, and more—is the largest gathering of artists, art historians, students, and arts professionals in the United States.

With these awards, CAA honors the accomplishments of individual artists, art historians, authors, conservators, curators, and critics whose efforts transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large.

Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
Suzanne Lacy
The continuum of Suzanne Lacy’s career mirrors the history of contemporary art: performance, installation, activism, social practice, and public engagement. An internationally regarded artist whose work includes installations, video, and performance, Lacy has addressed issues of sexual violence, aging, incarceration, illness, poverty, and a range of social-justice issues for almost four decades. Beginning in the early 1970s as a student at University of California, Fresno, and then in the Feminist Art Program at California Institute for the Arts, she was an integral and pioneering member of the Women’s Studio Workshop, Woman’s Building, and other important landmarks of feminist art. Since then, Lacy has maintained a career resolute in its commitment to feminism and social change.

Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work
Emory Douglas and Barkley L. Hendricks
Emory Douglas and Barkley L. Hendricks have long challenged the art world’s boundaries and received definitions in different but historically important ways. While working on opposite coasts and in different mediums, they transformed how African Americans saw themselves, and how they were seen. Emerging during the mid-1960s at a time of intense social upheaval, the two made work that was confrontational and incendiary, subversive and sly. While Douglas worked outside the confines of the art world as the Black Panther Party’s minister of culture, contributing to the Black Panther newspaper, Hendricks worked inside it without succumbing to the pressures and proscriptions against painting, particularly observational painting, and, to go one step further, portraiture.

Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
Holland Cotter
As a staff art critic at the New York Times for more than ten years, Holland Cotter has been remarkable for his unwavering attention to the work of those less recognized—including women artists, artists of color, and artists from all five boroughs of New York—giving important visibility to work of all kinds. His subjects have ranged from Italian Renaissance painting to street-based communal work by artist collectives. Writing widely about non-Western art and culture as well, Cotter has introduced readers to a broad range of contemporary Chinese art and helped bring contemporary art from India to wider critical notice.

Frank Jewett Mather Award
Terry Smith
Terry Smith is that rare art and social historian able to write criticism at once alert to the forces that contextualize art and sensitive to the elements and qualities that inhere to the works of art themselves. His most recent book, What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), contains a series of interrelated essays that unpack a vast range of topics and issues and take the reader on a theoretical tour through some of the world’s most influential art museums, laying bare their conflicted missions and studying the heightening distinction, and dispute, between modern and contemporary art.

Distinguished Feminist Award
Griselda Pollock
Griselda Pollock has earned a reputation not only as an influential scholar of modern and contemporary art and cultural studies, but also as a pioneer of feminist art, scholarship, and criticism. Her writings—including her groundbreaking 1980 monograph on Mary Cassatt and the pioneering volume Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), coauthored with Rozsika Parker—have had a major influence on feminist theory, feminist art history, and gender studies. Teaching at Leeds University since 1977, she was appointed chair in social and critical histories of art in 1990 and has served as director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory, and History.

Distinguished Teaching of Art Award
Dean Nimmer
Dean Nimmer, professor emeritus at the Massachusetts College of Art, has had a distinguished, dynamic, and astonishing career as an educator, empowering generations of artists through his enthusiasm and unbridled creativity. After thirty-four years of teaching painting, drawing, and printmaking in Boston, Nimmer thwarted all expectations for a retired professor by embarking on a second career as community arts educator, author, and provocateur. His recently published book, Art from Intuition: Overcoming Your Fears and Obstacles to Making Art (New York: Watson-Guptill, 2008), is a vehicle for him to share his wisdom with a new generation of artists and educators.

Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award
Richard Shiff
The impact of Richard Shiff, who holds the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art and directs the Center for the Study of Modernism at the University of Texas at Austin, on the teaching of art history comes not only through his many scholarly contributions to the field, but also through his extraordinary forty years of active teaching and mentorship. Students and colleagues alike praise his long and influential career, describing how he teaches art history within many contexts, weaving together elements of formal analysis, connoisseurship, and theory within the larger web of human history and experience. Shiff’s talent for merging the sometimes-uncomfortable process of learning with playfulness and adventure instills a love of discovery and thought in all who have experienced his charisma, no matter their chosen life path.

Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
Cammy Brothers
When one considers the vast bibliography on Michelangelo, it is a tribute to Cammy Brothers that her book is such a readable and masterful work of new scholarship and substantial insight into both the artist’s working methods and his modes of thinking. Remarkably erudite, Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) marshals compelling visual evidence along with literary, historical, and philosophical support on behalf of a fresh and persuasive argument.

See the shortlist for the Morey award.

Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award
Debra Diamond, Catherine Glynn, and Karni Singh Jasol, Gardens and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur
Gardens and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur (Washington, DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 2008) documents an exhibition that dramatically debuted to wide audiences a body of nineteenth-century Jodhpur painting little known even to experts in the field. The authors Debra Diamond, Catherine Glynn, and Karni Singh Jasol, with their fellow contributors Jason Freitag and Rahul Jain, are to be commended for this publication, which makes a major contribution to the study of the art of Southeast Asia through the production of breathtaking color plates and a text that impressively grounds the work in the context of Jodhpur history and the Nath religious sect.

See the shortlist for the Barr award.

Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
Michael Schreffler, “‘Their Cortés and Our Cortés’: Spanish Colonialism and Aztec Representation”
In his methodologically sophisticated and skillfully argued article, published in the December 2009 issue of The Art Bulletin, Michael Schreffler examines a key moment of cultural exchange and the misunderstandings to which it gave rise. Bravely departing from the consensus that Spanish conquistadors’ accounts of Aztec painting they saw at Antigua in 1519 constitute objective primary evidence about Aztec art, he offers instead a complex, nuanced, yet always clear explanation of what the accounts reveal about the colonizers and their subjective attitudes toward Aztec culture.

Art Journal Award
Joanna Grabski, “Urban Claims and Visual Sources in the Making of Dakar’s Art World City”
Joanna Grabski’s fascinating and ambitious essay, published in Art Journal in Spring 2009, is rich in first-hand information from her years of experience with the artists and institutions that make up this West African metropolis. Understanding the Senegalese capital as both site for innovative art practices, research, and international exchange, the author effectively demonstrates that in the hands of the city’s artists found objects have produced artworks and environments that meld their histories with languages of local form that reverberate with each other to piercing levels of impact.

CAA/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation
David Bomford
David Bomford, currently associate director for collections at the J. Paul Getty Museum, is celebrated for more than forty years of scholarship, practical application, and leadership in the field of paintings conservation. Beginning in 1968 as an assistant restorer at the National Gallery in London, he assumed the role of senior restorer by 1974, a position he held until 2005. In the course of his work, Bomford has advanced the study of art conservation to new levels by combining science, art history, and practical conservation knowledge in his extraordinary list of publications, and by spearheading the influential interdisciplinary study of technical art history. He wrote the single-most useful book for introducing both students and the public to the profession of paintings conservation, Conservation of Paintings (London: National Gallery Publications, 1997), which has become a standard reference guide for the discipline.

Contact

For more information on the 2010 Awards for Distinction, please contact Emmanuel Lemakis, CAA director of programs. Visit the Awards section of the CAA website to read about past awards recipients.

Robert Kaupelis: In Memoriam

posted by CAA — Dec 14, 2009

John Carey, an artist and art teacher, is the editorial cartoonist for Greater Media Newspapers in central New Jersey.

First there was Kimon Nicolaïdes’s Natural Way to Draw (1941), then there was Robert Beverly Hale’s Drawing Lessons from the Great Masters (1964). Then in 1966 came Robert Kaupelis’s Learning to Draw. It was a book smart enough and egalitarian enough to employ old and modern masters’ examples along with students’ work; the point was the dynamics of application, not only the procedures of attempting realism. I discovered that book in 1972 in my high school library in Richmond, Kentucky. The book offered me and my generation what we knew but didn’t quite trust yet—the processes of mark-making, be it gentle, violent, nuanced, or bold. We had seen those applications in artworks we admired—old and new—but we hadn’t had it broken down in a philosophy with lessons before. When I saw that the author of Learning to Draw taught at New York Univeristy I knew where I wanted to go to college. Three years later I was in Kaupelis’s classroom.

Describing a great teacher is a bit like explaining a great performance. There is context, delivery, insight, and presence; there is also something else: the mark left. That mark is often as elusive as an actor’s impact, but as in theater, there are now and then a few mentors that remain definitive for us in their transformative and indelible effects. In this regard Kaupelis was a star. His energy and intelligence demanded attention, and in turn one realized that a reciprocity of that demand was expected in the presentation of one’s artwork and in the articulation of one’s efforts. It was also understood that respect came only from very hard, serious work. And it was great fun. “Change!” was something often heard in the art studio (along with Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, and Beethoven LPs); Kaupelis would shout “Change!” to models he kept busy, finding one quick pose after another as our young tentative arms began to loosen up with quick contour and gesture drawings in our search for some beauty with our own mark-making. After a few of these energized classes a Kaupelis student never looked at art in the same way again. The lessons of Learning to Draw had met the energy of the man behind it. Change had happened.

Kaupelis, who died on June 12, 2009, began teaching at NYU in 1956. He was born in Amsterdam, New York, in 1928 and educated in Buffalo and at Columbia University. In 1975 he was the subject of a chapter in a Herbert Livesey book surveying higher education called The Professors, where he was cited as one of the nation’s outstanding art educators. In 1980 Kaupelis wrote his second Watson-Guptill drawing book, Experimental Drawing, which reinforced his exuberant amalgam of stressing the fundamentals of art along with encouraging innovative and, at times, refreshingly quirky approaches: fifty nonstop drawings in three hours, drawing from out-of-focus slides, drawing the model with eyes shut. This newer book was almost as significant as Learning to Draw because at the time it was published drawing had become a very undervalued curriculum in university programs; it was a time when drawing was considered by many as old-fashioned and nearly irrelevant.

As an artist Kaupelis emerged as the New York School rose to prominence, and when nonobjective American art found its place on the world stage. His own work reflected that influence in its vibrancy and spontaneity. He was, as the critic John Canaday wrote, a seductive colorist. Eventually geometry and sharp, taped edges also merged and interacted with the wetter, looser applications. While the paintings of Kaupelis represented some of his philosophies about aesthetics, I never felt they fully matched his ability to illuminate and celebrate the art of others—the art in galleries and museums and the work of his students. He wrote and spoke of art the way Martin Scorsese speaks of movies—with a compulsive, obsessive, comprehensive insight. He thought and taught art like a man intoxicated with the anticipation of romance—that ineffable state of mind where joy and passion merge with love.

Kaupelis asked a lot from his readers and students. His main demand was: “LOOK!”—look at this: at this sepia wash Constable landscape; this Sheeler charcoal still life; this De Kooning gouache; this pen-and-ink Manet portrait; this Rauschenberg collage; this Pontormo red-chalk figure dancing off the page with a gesture line of astonishing confidence, speed, and grace! Look at this form, this line, this shade, this figure, this edge, this space! Look at your assimilation of them all! How many future artists, curators, art historians, cartoonists, animators, illustrators and teachers were asked to LOOK by Kaupelis during his thirty years at NYU and in his two important drawing books, Learning to Draw and Experimental Drawing? Thousands.

Kaupelis said drawing was anything intended as art which left a mark. He left his.

Filed under: Obituaries —

Michael Kabotie: In Memoriam

posted by CAA — Nov 23, 2009

Zena Pearlstone is emeritus professor of art history at California State University, Fullerton.

Michael Kabotie with his work at the Del Rio Gallery in Flagstaff, Arizona

Michael Kabotie (Lomawywesa), a Hopi painter, jeweler, poet, and printmaker, died in Flagstaff, Arizona, on October 23, 2009, of complications from H1N1 influenza. He was 67.

Kabotie is known among Hopi artists as one who commanded several media and constantly pushed his iconographic and technical skills. His work was always powerful and often mystical. Kabotie worked with the mythology and sentiments of his people, but he described his art as pushing back in time in an attempt to arrive at the roots or basics of Hopi teachings that would promote a common understanding. His intelligence was far reaching. Some people think outside the box, but for him there never was a box.

Kabotie was born in 1942 at Songoopovi, Second Mesa, Hopi, a member of the Snow-Water clan and the son of the artist Fred Kabotie and Alice Kabotie. He attended Hopi High School, where he studied art with his father, and in 1961 graduated from the Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas. He began studies in engineering but did not complete the program, preferring to devote his full attention to his art. He lived at Hopi and also, for many years, in Flagstaff and New Mexico.

During the sixties and into the seventies Kabotie’s work was influenced by ancestral Pueblo art and European modernism. In the 1960 and 1961 Southwest Indian Art Project summer program at the University of Arizona, he studied with the Cochiti artist Joe Herrera, who introduced him to the kiva murals at the Hopi site of Awotovi. Herrera, Kabotie said, opened his eyes to the art of his people. The murals and the related Sikyatki pottery images remained a reference for Kabotie throughout his career. At his 1967 initiation into the Wuwtsim (a priesthood society) Kabotie received the name Lomawywesa, “Walking in Harmony.” The ceremony led him to consider the art of his ancestors as more central than modern art.

Still it was important to Kabotie to work with other artists in a modernist style that extracted elements from ancient sources. In 1973 he was a founding member of Artist Hopid, a group of five contemporary Hopi artists who felt the need to communicate their cultural and artistic experiences. Speaking for the group Kabotie said, “We hoped that from the presentation of our traditions and from the interpretations of the Hopi way in our art and paintings a new direction would come for American spirituality.” In 1996, he continued his search for basic truths when he began sharing canvases with Jack Dauben, who is of Celtic ancestry.

Michael Kabotie, silver pendant, 2004

Kabotie began silversmithing seriously in the late 1970s. His unique work modified Hopi overlay into three-dimensional pieces, a process most Hopi jewelers would never attempt. One stunning 2001 bracelet with Awotovi designs is built like a box, squared and hollow, an astounding construction feat.

Kabotie’s painting and jewelry were incorporated into large public works, including murals at Sunset Crater Visitors Center in Arizona; a large mural, Journey of the Human Spirit, made with Delbridge Honanie and now in the Kiva Gallery at the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff; and a gate at the Heard Museum in Phoenix designed to look like a piece of overlay jewelry.

Kabotie was a Southwestern force and in all his endeavors an ambassador for Hopi while absorbing the ideas of other cultures. In a career of almost fifty years, he was involved, as either participant or consultant, in myriad projects concerning Southwest and Californian art and culture. He worked with indigenous artists in New Zealand, Brazil and Mexico; had exhibitions in fourteen US states, South America, Europe, and New Zealand; and served as an advisor to the Heard Museum, the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles, and the Idyllwild California Summer Arts program at the Idyllwild Arts Foundation. At the latter Kabotie taught Hopi overlay jewelry techniques for almost twenty years. His work is held by museums in the United States and Europe. In 2003 he received the Arizona Indian Living Treasure Award.

He was a warm and caring person and a wonderful friend. His thoughtfulness and his humor went hand in hand. He was a quick wit and always the trickster. “Come have Thanksgiving with us,” he asked one year. “We have too many Indians and not enough Pilgrims.”

Kabotie leaves a monumental body of work that will be admired and influential for many years. He leaves a large family and a multitude of friends, all of whom adored and respected him.

Filed under: Obituaries —

Recent Deaths in the Arts

posted by Christopher Howard — Oct 27, 2009

CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, curators, photographers, collectors, architects, museum directors, and other professionals and important figures in the visual arts.

• Maurice Agis, a London-born sculptor and creator of Dreamspace, an inflatable, interactive sculpture that explores color, form, movement, light and sound, died on October 12, 2009, at the age of 77
• Maryanne Amacher, a composer of site-specific sound installations that explore psychoacoustic properties, died on October 22, 2009. She was 66
• Ruth Duckworth, a modernist sculptor of abstract ceramic forms, a muralist, and a ceramics teacher at the University of Chicago, died on October 18, 2009, at the age of 90
• Amos Ferguson, a Bahamian folk artist known for his depictions of biblical scenes and of the landscape and culture of his country, died on October 19, 2009. He was 89.
• Gerald Ferguson, an artist who established the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where he taught for thirty-eight years, as a major international center of conceptual art, died on October 8, 2009, at the age of 72
• Suzanne Fiol, the founder of Issue Project Room, an art and performance space in Brooklyn, died on October 5, 2009. She was 49
• Nat Finkelstein, the house photographer for Andy Warhol’s Factory for three years in the mid-1960s, died on October 2, 2009. He was 76
• Donald Fisher, a cofounder of the Gap who collected modern art and supported the arts and civic culture in San Francisco, died on September 27, 2009, at the age of 81
• Anne Friedberg, an art historian, theorist, and teacher whose work combined media and film studies, art history, and architecture, died on October 9, 2009, at the age of 57
• Bernard Leo Fuchs, an illustrator whose works for Cosmopolitan, Sports Illustrated, and TV Guide combined realism with avant-garde techniques, died on September 17, 2009. He was 76
• Lawrence Halprin, a landscape architect whose best-known works include the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, DC, and Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco, died on October 25, 2009 at the age of 93
• Jenelsie Walden Holloway, an artist, advocate for African American art, and a teacher at Spelman College for thirty-eight years, died on October 15, 2009, at the age of 89
• Henry T. Hopkins, former director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Hammer Museum, founder of the Huysman Gallery in Los Angeles, and professor and chair of the Department of Art at UCLA, died on September 27, 2009, at the age of 81
• Barry Horn, executive director of the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art in Brownsville, Texas, died on October 24, 2009. He was 59
• Michael Komechak, a teacher of English and art and a curator at Benedictine University in Illinois, where he helped to acquire over 3,700 works of art from around the world, died on August 19, 2009. He was 77
• Barbara Morris, a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum who was one of the first scholars to treat the study of Victorian art and design as an academic discipline, died on July 15, 2009, at the age of 90
• Robert M. Murdock, an independent curator and scholar of modern and contemporary art who was also a museum director and curator, died on October 8, 2009, at the age of 67
• Emile Norman, an artist and sculptor whose best-known works are the glass mosaic window and sculptural reliefs created for a Masonic temple in San Francisco, died on September 24, 2009. He was 91
• Irving Penn, a fashion photographer whose elegant, minimal works appeared in the pages of Vogue and on the walls of museums, died on October 7, 2009, at the age of 92
• Monica Pidgeon, an editor at Architectural Design who promoted the work of major modernist architects, died on September 17, 2009. She was 95
• Don Ivan Punchatz, an illustrator of novels, magazines, and the first Star Wars film poster, died on October 22, 2009, at the age of 73
• Richard Robbins, a painter, etcher, and sculptor who was the head of fine art at Middlesex University in London, died on July 28, 2009, at the age of 82
• George Sample, an architect who founded the nonprofit Chicago Architectural Assistance Center, which provided design and construction support to inner-city neighborhoods, died on October 4, 2009. He was 90
• Harry Sefarbi, a painter and teacher at the Barnes Foundation whose colorful paintings can be found in many museum collections, died on September 28, 2009. He was 92
• Charles Seliger, an Abstract Expressionist painter whose small works of imaginary forms were influenced by Surrealism and automatism, died on October 1, 2009, at the age of 83
• Nancy Spero, an artist and feminist who combined drawing, painting, collage, and printmaking to create politicized work, died on October 18, 2009 at the age of 83. She was a member of Women Artists in Revolution and a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery, which promotes women’s art
• Alfred Brockie Stevenson, an American realist painter known for his nostalgic images of American life, died on September 1, 2009. He was 89
• Dietrich von Bothmer, curator emeritus of Greek and Roman antiquities at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a professor at the Institute of Fine Art at New York University, died on October 12, 2009, at the age of 91. He helped to develop the museum’s collection of Greek vases into one of the largest in the world

Read all past obituaries in the arts on the CAA website.

Filed under: Obituaries, People in the News —

Photographer Dawoud Bey Is the Keynote Speaker for the Chicago Conference

posted by Christopher Howard — Oct 22, 2009

The renowned photographer Dawoud Bey will deliver the keynote address during Convocation at the 2010 CAA Annual Conference in Chicago. A resident of the conference city, Bey is Distinguished College Artist and Associate Professor of Art at Columbia College Chicago. He is the second photographer in four years to speak at Convocation, with Duane Michals delivering the keynote address at the 2007 conference in New York.

Convocation, which also includes the presentation of the CAA Awards for Distinction, takes place at the Hyatt Regency Chicago on Wednesday evening, February 10, 2010, 5:30–7:00 PM. The event is free and open to the public.

Bey earned a BA at Empire State College and an MFA at the Yale University School of Art, and he has been teaching for more than thirty years. He began his artistic career in 1975 with a series of photographs, Harlem, USA, that was later exhibited in his first solo exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. He has since had numerous exhibitions worldwide, at such institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Barbican Centre in London, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, where his works were included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial.

Since 1992 he has completed several collaborative projects working with young people and museums together in a broad dialogue that seeks to create an engaging space for art making and institutional interrogation. These projects, such as photographs from the Character Project, have also been aimed at broadening the participation of various communities served by these institutions.

The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis organized a midcareer survey of his work in 1995 that traveled to institutions throughout the United States and Europe. A major publication, Dawoud Bey: Portraits, 1975–1995, was published in conjunction with that show. Aperture published his latest project, Class Pictures, in 2007 and mounted an exhibition of this work that has been touring museums nationally.

Bey’s works are included in permanent collections of art museums worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, among others. He has received numerous fellowships over the course of his career, including those from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

A writer as well as an artist, Bey has published critical writings on contemporary art in books and journals throughout the US and Europe. He is the author of several groundbreaking essays, including “The Black Artist as Invisible (Wo)Man” in the catalogue for High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967–1975 (2006), in which he places the work of African American artists Al Loving, Joe Overstreet, Howardena Pindell, and Jack Whitten within this important era in art history. Bey is also the author of “David Hammons: In the Spirit of Minkisi” (1994), which was one of the first texts to place this important African American artist within the tradition of Black Atlantic cosmological tradition. This essay appeared as the catalogue essay for Hammon’s survery exhibition at the Salzburger Kunstverein in Vienna. Closer to home, his text “Authoring the Black Image” was published in the Art Institute of Chicago’s book The VanDerZee Studio, accompanying the eponymous exhibition from 2004.

The above portrait photograph is © Bart Harris.

Filed under: Annual Conference, People in the News —

Women’s Caucus for Art Announces 2010 Lifetime Achievement Awards

posted by Christopher Howard — Oct 05, 2009

The Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) has announced the recipients of the 2010 Lifetime Achievement Awards: Tritobia Hayes Benjamin, an educator and art historian from Washington, DC; Mary Jane Jacob, a curator and educator in Chicago; Senga Nengudi, an artist based in Colorado Springs; Joyce J. Scott, a visual and performance artist from Baltimore; and New York’s Spiderwoman Theater, comprising Lisa Mayo, Gloria Miguel, and Muriel Miguel.

These awards were first awarded in 1979 to Isabel Bishop, Selma Burke, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, and Georgia O’Keeffe in a ceremony at President Jimmy Carter’s Oval Office. Past honorees have represented the full range of distinguished achievement in the visual arts, and this year’s awardees are no exception, with considerable accomplishment, achievement, and contributions represented by their professional efforts.

Tritobia Hayes Benjamin

Tritobia Hayes Benjamin is professor of art history and director of the Gallery of Art at Howard University in Washington, DC, where she is also associate dean of the Division of Fine Arts in the College of Arts and Sciences. After receiving her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art history from Howard, she earned a PhD in the same subject from the University of Maryland. On the faculty of Howard since 1970, Benjamin has written and lectured widely on African American art and artists, including the 1994 publication, The Life and Art of Lois Mailou Jones.

Mary Jane Jacob

Mary Jane Jacob is a curator, educator, and author noted for her work on the national and international art scene. She currently serves as professor in the Department of Sculpture and executive of exhibitions at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She began her curatorial career at the Detroit Institute of Arts in the late 1970s before becoming chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In the public realm, Jacobs has organized multiyear installations and commissioned outdoor sculptures in urban and park settings. She has also published numerous books and exhibition catalogues on contemporary art.

Senga Nengudi

Senga Nengudi is strongly committed to both creating art and arts education. Currently a lecturer at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs in the Visual Arts and Performing Arts Department, she has always been involved with bringing arts programs emphasizing diversity to the communities in which she resides. Presently Nengudi’s sculptures are taking the form of installations of increasing size. She has been a featured performance artist, dancer, and installation artists in numerous exhibitions at major museums.

Joyce J. Scott

A native of Baltimore, Joyce J. Scott is a highly internationally regarded artist whose work incorporates various artistic media, including sculpture, jewelry, glass, printmaking, installation, and performance art. Her pieces draw strong influence from a wide range of sources: African and Native American experiences, comic books, television, popular American culture, and the culture of the streets of her urban Baltimore neighborhood. The use of beads is a central element throughout Scott’s work, helping turn her works into bold statements about such issues as racism, sexism, violence, and other forms of social injustice.

Spiderwoman Theater (Lisa Mayo, Gloria Miguel, and Muriel Miguel)

Spiderwoman Theater was founded in 1976 when Muriel Miguel gathered a diverse company of women of varying ages, races, sexual orientations, and worldviews, which included her two sisters. As the oldest women’s theater company in North America and originally emerging from the feminist movement, Spiderwoman continues moving toward its goal of creating an artistic environment where indigenous arts and culture—the three are from the Kuna and Rappahannock nations—thrive as an integrated and vital part of the larger arts community. Taking its name from the Hopi creation goddess Spiderwoman, who taught the people to weave, the theater calls its technique of creating their theatrical pieces “story weaving,” in which performers write and present personal and traditional stories that are layered with movement, text, sound, music, and visual images.

Award Ceremony in Chicago

The Lifetime Achievement Awards will be held at the Chicago Cultural Center, 77 East Randolph Street, on Saturday, February 13, 2010, in conjunction with the WCA and CAA annual conferences (WCA is a CAA affiliated society). A dinner will be held from 6:30 to 7:30 PM in the center’s G.A.R. Hall. The awards ceremony will follow at 7:30 PM in the Cassidy Theater. Tickets for the dinner—$90 before January 1, 2010, and $100 after—will be available for purchase from the WCA website. Reserved seating tickets for the awards ceremony will also be available for $10; limited general-audience seating for the awards ceremony is free and available on a first-come, first-served basis—please arrive early. For more information about WCA, please contact Karin Luner, national administrator.

Filed under: Annual Conference, Awards, People in the News —

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