2012 Lifetime Achievement Awards

 

WOMEN’S CAUCUS FOR ART
announces the
2012 Awards Recipients

Women’s Caucus for Art is delighted to announce that the 2012 recipients for the Lifetime Achievement Award are: Whitney Chadwick, Suzanne Lacy, Ferris Olin, Bernice Steinbaum, and Trinh T. Minh-ha.
The Lifetime Achievement Awards were first awarded in 1979 in President Jimmy Carter’s Oval Office to Isabel Bishop, Selma Burke, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, and Georgia O'Keeffe. Past honorees have represented the full range of distinguished achievement in the visual arts professions. This year’s awardees are no exception, with considerable accomplishment, achievement, and contributions to the visual arts represented by their professional efforts.
This year’s Lifetime Achievement Awards will be held in Los Angeles on Saturday evening, February 25, 2012, in conjunction with the Women’s Caucus for Art and College Art Association’s 2012 Annual Conferences. 

During the fall of 2011, the Women’s Caucus for Art began its preparations for the Honor Awards. One of the first items of business was the selection of the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Awardees. The selected artists and art historians represent divergent interests in the visual arts, but share characteristics in their significant accomplishments and in their commitment to innovation.

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2012 Lifetime Achievement Awards Recipients

Whitney Chadwick is Professor Emerita of San Francisco State University. During 2011-2012, she is a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. An abbreviated list of her publications include: The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars (Editor, with Tirza True Latimer), 2003; Leonora Carrington: La Realidad de la Imaginacion (Mexico City: Ediciones ERA, 1994); Women, Art, and Society (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1990); and Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985).

Suzanne Lacy is an internationally known artist whose work includes installations, video, and large-scale performances on social themes and urban issues.  A founding member of the Feminist Studio Workshop at the Woman's Building in Los Angeles, Lacy pioneered the exploration of art as a force in the community and within the media. One of her best-known works to date is The Crystal Quilt (Minneapolis, 1987) a performance with 430 older women, broadcast live on Public Television. Lacy currently directs the Master of Fine Arts program in Public Practice at Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles.

Ferris Olin, professor, Rutgers University, educator, curator, arts administrator, women’s studies scholar, and librarian works at the nexus of academia, entrepreneurship, and feminist visual arts. Through building and leading institutions, she is a crucial figure in insuring that the aesthetic and intellectual impact of women and diverse communities is recognized and documented in the cultural record.

Bernice Steinbaum founded her successful New York gallery in 1977. Throughout her career, Steinbaum has demonstrated a commitment to showing the work of women artists and creating both edgy and intelligent exhibitions. In 2000, she closed her gallery in New York and relocated to Miami, where her Bernice Steinbaum Gallery has transformed the arts community. Presently, Steinbaum represents leading contemporary artists such as Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Luis Gonzalez Palma, Pepón Osorio, and Deborah Willis.

Trinh T. Minh-ha is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. She is an accomplished filmmaker, composer, author, and installation artist. Her work has been widely recognized and she is the recipient of fellowships from Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the California Arts Council. An abbreviated list of films includes: Reassemblage (1982), Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), The Fourth Dimension (2001), and Night Passage (2004)

 

President’s Award for Art & Activism

Karen Mary Davalos is chair and associate professor of Chicana/o Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. She has published widely on Chicana and Chicano art, spirituality, and public and museum culture. She is the only scholar to have written two books on Chicano museums, Exhibiting Mestizaje: Mexican (American) Museums in the Diaspora (University of New Mexico Press, 2001) and The Mexican Museum of San Francisco Papers, 1971-2006 (The Chicano Archives, vol. 3, UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2010). Her book, Yolanda M. López, (UCLA CSRC Press with distribution by University of Minnesota Press, 2008), brings together her research and teaching interests in Chicana feminist scholarship, spirituality, art, exhibition practices, and oral history.

Cathy Salser has dedicated the last twenty years to working with battered women and their children, offering art as a catalyst of healing and empowerment. In 1991, Cathy began A Window Between Worlds as a one-summer art project intended to share art in a way that "might make a difference." What she saw, and what made A Window Between Worlds grow to reach over 60,000 participants annually today, is the confirmation again and again that even a single art session could change a survivor's live forever. In 2007, Salser was the recipient of the Bank of America Local Hero award, and in January 2008 she was selected from tens of thousands of applicants and honored with the prestigious Avon Hello Tomorrow Fund Award.

 

WCA Media Award

Lynn Hershman Leeson is a recipient of the 2010-2011 develop digital art and the 2009 SIGGRAPH Lifetime Achievement Awards. Hershman also recently received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Over the last three decades, artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson has been internationally acclaimed for her pioneering use of new technologies and her investigations of issues that are now recognized as key to the working of our society: identity in a time of consumerism, privacy in a era of surveillance, interfacing of humans and machines, and the relationship between real and virtual worlds.