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Previous Exhibition Award Winners
2006
AMATEURS
Ralph Rugoff, Guest Curator
CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts San Francisco, CA
Against the background of an increasingly professionalized art world, Amateurs will be the first major exhibition to survey recent artworks in which amateurism is embraced as a critical aesthetic strategy and a mode of production. Favored by conceptual artists and earlier by modernist vanguards, an aesthetic of amateurism has long served as a means for deflating models of academic and market-driven art. The artists in this exhibition elaborate on this tradition, embracing amateurism as a means for questioning basic assumptions about authorship, expertise, the relationship between artist and audience, and the contingency of cultural values. In all of their work, we also encounter notions of the amateur as someone willing to explore areas that are ignored by more expert practitioners, and whose approach is noteworthy for its willingness to depart from established technical, formal, and conceptual standards. And whereas in the past the amateur was often valued as a figure of purity, amateur culture is celebrated here for its disruptive impurity—its accidental or inappropriate mixing of different genres, aesthetics, and symbolic codes.
ARTE ¹ VIDA: ACTIONS BY ARTISTS OF THE AMERICAS 1960-2000
Deborah Cullen, Director of Curatorial Programs
El Museo del Barrio New York, NY
Arte ≠ Vida will examine the vast array of performative actions produced by Caribbean, Latino and Latin American artists over the last half-century. By gathering film, video and photographic documentation; tests, costumes, and props; key artworks intrinsic to significant works; as well as by re-creating select pieces, the exhibit will explore both the interconnections of these artists to the canonical Western history of performance art, as well as their different and specific trajectories. Arte ≠ Vida (which in Spanish means, “Art is not equal to Life”) will contextualize these activities against their particular geo-political and cultural environment. At the same time, overall thematic constellations might include: political and social critique; embrace of spirituality, myth, and ritual; and an undercurrent, which questions Latino identity vs. cultural/artistic dominance.
BLACK IS, BLACK AIN’T
Hamza Walker, Associate Curator and Director of Education
The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago Chicago, IL
Black Is, Black Ain’t will build upon the dialogue initiated by exhibitions in the past 15 years that explore the cultural production of race. Black Is, Black Ain’t will register a shift in the rhetoric of race from an earlier emphasis on inclusion, a la multiculturalism, to the current moment where race, just as it is readily acknowledged as a social construct and therefore seemingly capable of being relinquished, is also reified to the extent that one could just as easily speak of a “blackness without blacks.” The exhibition will include black and non-black artists whose work specifically addresses race with the goal of using the artists to highlight the construction and deconstruction of a racial identity.
2004
REALITY BITES: MAKING AVANT-GARDE ART IN POST-WALL GERMANY
Sabine Eckman, Curator
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University St. Louis, MO
The exhibition will bring into focus the interdependence of art and the social economic, and political worlds since the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989 and the subsequent unification of the two Germanys in October of 1990. Exploring how a new generation of visual artists has dealt, directly and indirectly with the effects of unification Reality Bites will be organized around three themes: national identity, globalization and collective trauma. The artworks to be presented – video, photography, installation, assemblage, paintings, and drawings executed in the first decade of the new Germany – mediate as well as contribute to the political, geographical and cultural transformation of the transitional time for the new country.
STREET ART, STREET LIFE
Lydia Yee, Senior Curator
Bronx Museum of the Arts Bronx, NY
The exhibition will examine the street as subject matter, venue and source of inspiration for contemporary artists and photographers from the late 1950’s to the present. Through works by more than 30 major and emerging artists, Street Art, Street Life will include street photography; documentation of performance, events and artworks presented in the street; works using material from the street; and examples of street culture.
2002
SKIN TIGHT: THE SENSIBILITY OF THE FLESH
Sylvia Chivaratanond, Guest Curator
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL
This show works to portray art and fashion as two fields that influence and react to one another. The show will explore the work of innovative contemporary designers who use clothes to probe the cultural construction of the physical identity, challenging the perception and presentation of the self. The exhibition will include garments, shoes, photographs, video, and installations designed by a group of international designers in order to articulate the combined lifestyles of the industrial with the technological and the spatial with the functional.
THE PAST IN REVERSE: CONTEMPORARY ART OF EAST ASIA
Betti-Sue Hertz, Curator of Contemporary Art
San Diego Museum of Art San Diego, CA
A multifaceted exhibition that showcases artists who combine traditional materials and practices of Asia with contemporary approaches to expressing internal realities such as the poetic states of silence, meditation, nature and the dynamic between presence and absence. The curator will select approximately sixteen artists for the exhibition who are on the cutting edge of their fields in their respective country, and who utilize modern and traditional technologies to create art.
DOWN THE GARDEN PATH: THE ARTIST’S GARDEN AFTER MODERNISM
Valerie Smith, Director of Exhibitions
Queens Museum of Art Queens, NY
The exhibit will trace the history of contemporary artist gardens while showing how artists use gardens as a vehicle to explore topics such as history, ecology and philosophy. There will be a garden installation that consists of five-commissioned artist gardens and as well as a museum exhibition. The museum installation will encompass an international group of artists, who use the garden as a vehicle to comment on global issues, such as: the absence of modernity and failed utopia, death, memory, and myth; and art and science.
2000
WORK ETHIC
Helen Molesworth, Curator of Contemporary Art
Baltimore Museum of Art Baltimore, MD
This show focuses on the ways artists have tried to challenge, subvert, and question the creation of value for art through its production. The exhibit features commissioned works from performing and visual artists.
ART AND HEALING: RITUAL AND TRANSFORMATION
Jessica Morgan, Curator
The Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, MA
An interactive collaborative exhibit that combines work over the past decade and present day to explore the roles of ritual, narrative, metaphor and movement to promote healing. One component will be held at the museum with an exhibit that includes 14 artists working in various visual and performance mediums. A second component will be a commissioned performance piece at the Children’s Hospital of Boston. The final part will be an educational/ therapeutic one that places teens with mental illness in an after-school media program in which their progress is monitored and evaluated.
THE MAE WEST SHOW
Larissa Harris, Curatorial Assistant
P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center Queens, NY
Site-specific works by New York based artists working in various mediums will be commissioned to examine the issues that the actress Mae West combines in her public persona such as class, race, sexuality, humor and irony. While the exhibits are displayed daily lunchtime screenings of Mae West’s signature films and periodic panel discussions with the artists and critics that work with such issues will be at the exhibit space.
OUTER AND INNER SPACE: A VIDEO EXHIBITION IN THREE PARTS
John Ravenal, Curator of Contemporary Art
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Richmond, VA
This exhibit will feature three recent video installations displayed in comparison to video art from the past three decades to show the maturity and development of the video art field. The theme of the video installations will focus on contrasting the reality of the mind with physical reality. Each of the recent videos will be an individualized part of the exhibit and will be viewed with 10 single-channel videos from earlier decades.
1998
AGAINST DESIGN
Steven Beyer, Guest Curator
Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA
The first U.S. based thematic exhibition that brought together an international group of ten young artists whose work focused on the utilitarian aspects of artwork and the aesthetic aspects of industrially designed products. The pieces in the exhibit ranged from six and nine-foot square throw pillows to billboards to a life-size inhabitable compact self-contained living unit.
FAITH: THE IMPACT OF JUDEO-CHRISTIAN RELIGION ON ART AT THE MILLENNIUM
Jointly curated by: Christian Eckart, Artist; Osvaldo Romberg, Artist; and Harry Philbrick, Museum Director
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum Ridgefield, CT
The exhibition, which also incorporated off-site installations at three local churches and a synagogue, explored the ways in which contemporary artists examine and interpret the Jewish and Christian traditions. The works amassed were in a full range of media, and together illustrated the complexity of religious beliefs at the end of the millennium.
Questions? Please visit the Exhibition Award FAQs page before contacting the Foundation.
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