2008 Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award Winners

Kimberli Meyer, director of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture – with a team of curators including Lisa Henry, Nizan Shaked and Gloria Sutton – was awarded $150,000 by the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation to mount How Many Billboards on the Boulevard? in late 2009. The large outdoor exhibition of commissioned billboards will highlight the legacies of California conceptually-oriented art. Dealing explicitly with the intersection of media, public space and conceptual practice in art, the public exhibition will emphasize the living history of a major legacy in California of Conceptual Art, and the remarkable range and diversity of the artists it has, and continues, to influence. The artists will be commissioned to contribute a new artwork that responds to the specificity of the billboard as media. The show will also examine the influences of popular culture on conceptualism, and the synthesis of these movements in California.

Stephanie Smith, director of collections and exhibitions and curator of contemporary art at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, was awarded $150,000 by the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation for Feast: Radical Hospitality and Contemporary Art to be mounted in early 2011. Feast will examine contemporary art in which the art of gathering together for a meal becomes a forum for – as well as a form of – critical aesthetic engagement. The exhibition will include commissions of new public art projects presented outside the museum, as well as a broader art historical survey of artist-orchestrated meals throughout the 20th century.