2010 Lifetime Achievement Awards
WOMEN’S CAUCUS FOR
ART ANNOUNCES
the 2010 Lifetime Achievement Awards
Women’s Caucus for Art is delighted to announce that this year’s recipients for the Lifetime Achievement Award are: Tritobia Hayes Benjamin, Mary Jane Jacob, Senga Nengudi, Joyce J. Scott, and Spiderwoman Theater (Lisa Mayo, Gloria Miguel, Muriel Miguel).
This year's President's Awards go to Juana Guzman, Vice President, National Museum of Mexican Art, and Karen Reimer, artist and educator.
Biographical information on these
awardees is below.
The Lifetime Achievement Awards were first presented in
1979 in President Jimmy Carte’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.
This year’s Lifetime Achievement Awards will be held at the
Chicago Cultural Center, 77 East Randolph Street, Chicago, Illinois 60601
on Saturday, February 13, 2010, in conjunction with the Women’s Caucus
for Art and College Art Association’s 2010 Annual Conferences. The
dinner will be held from 6:30-7:30 p.m. in the G.A.R. Hall of the Chicago
Cultural Center The awards ceremony will follow at 7:30 p.m. in
the Cassidy Theater.
Tickets for the dinner $90 (before January 1,
2010), $100 (after January 1, 2010) will be available for purchase from
the Women’s Caucus for Art. Reserved
seating tickets for the awards ceremony will also be available for $10
purchase from the website. General audience seating for the awards
ceremony is free and does not require a ticket, but seating is limited
and anyone interested in attending should arrive early. Seating in
the general audience section is available on a first-come, first-served
basis.
Tritobia Hayes Benjamin
Educator
and Art Historian, Washington, DC
Dr. Benjamin is Associate Dean of the Division of Fine Arts,
College of Arts and Sciences, Professor of Art History, and Director of
the Gallery of Art at Howard University. She earned a Bachelor’s and Master’s
degrees in art history from Howard University and a Ph.D. in art history
from the University of Maryland. Dr. Benjamin’s distinguished
career has been in the field of African American art history. She has
been on the faculty of Howard University in the College of Fine Arts, since
1970. Her service and expertise have been in demand throughout the United
States and abroad with an extensive and impressive record of consultancies,
awards, lectureships, study tours. She is a much sought after exhibition
juror. Her professional memberships reflect the life and energies of
a scholar who is committed to excellence in the field of African American
art history. Benjamin has written and lectured widely on African American
art and artists, and is known for her 1994 publication, The Life and
Art of Lois Mailou Jones.
Mary Jane Jacob
Curator and Educator, Chicago, IL
Mary Jane Jacob is a curator, educator, and author noted for her innovative curatorial
work focusing on contemporary public art on the national and international
art scene. She began as a curator at The Detroit Institute of Arts in the
late 1970s and served as chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary
Art, Chicago and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She
has been an independent curator since 1990 and as Curator for the Spoleto
Festival USA, she has organized public art installations on a city-wide scale
for multi-year installations. The 1991 “Places with a Past” was the
first such site-specific exhibition in the U.S. and was documented in a major
book published by Rizzoli. She has published numerous books and
exhibition catalogues on contemporary art. Her latest anthology is Learning
Mind: Experience Into Art. Ms. Jacob is Professor of Sculpture
and Executive Director of Exhibitions at The School of the Art Institute
of Chicago and is the recipient of numerous grants and awards.
Senga
Nengudi
Artist,
Colorado
Senga Nengudi's performance-based sculptures and installations
explore aspects of the body in relation to ritual, philosophy, and spirituality.
In the 1960s and 1970s, her avant-garde work helped bring traditional African
forms into mainstream contemporary art. Born in Chicago, raised and educated in
California and during a year of post graduate study in Tokyo, Japan, and
residing in New York City in the early 70’s, Nengudi now lives in Colorado,
where she teaches at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
in the Visual Arts and Performing Arts Department. From early on she
was involved in the visual arts, dance, body movement, and the spirit,
still the focus of her art. She explores a variety of natural, manufactured, and
found materials in her improvisational works. Her goal is
to deeply involve viewers and to draw them in as participants. Along
with making art, Nengudi is strongly committed to arts education. 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 larger and larger installations. She
has been featured as a performance artist, dancer, and installation artist
in numerous exhibitions at major museums.
Joyce J.Scott
Visual & Performance
Artist, Maryland
Joyce J. Scott is one of her native city of Baltimore’s
most highly regarded artists of African-American, Native American, and Scottish
heritage, she works in a wide variety of artistic media, including sculpture,
jewelry making, printmaking, glass, installation art and performance art.
She received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and MFA in
Crafts from the Institute Allende in Mexico. Scott’s pieces are inspired
by a wide-range of sources, from African and Native American experiences
to comic books, television, and popular American culture, including that
of her urban Baltimore neighborhood. The use of beads is a central element
throughout Scott’s work, which makes bold statements about such
issues as racism, sexism, violence, and injustice. For more than three
decades, this multi-talented artist and provocateur has created objects of
exceptional skill and beauty while offering her own distinctive commentary
on social issues, shown in her 2000 retrospective exhibition at the Baltimore
Museum of Art. She is also an educator focusing on community-based arts programs. Her
mother, fiber-artist Elizabeth Talford Scott, was also a past recipient
of a WCA Lifetime Achievement Award.
Spiderwoman Theater
(Lisa
Mayo, Gloria Miguel, Muriel Miguel)
Performance
Artists, New York
Spiderwoman Theater was founded in 1976 when Muriel Miguel along with
her two sisters formed a diverse company of women of varying ages, races,
sexual orientations and world views, as part of the feminist movement. Spiderwoman
Theater is the oldest women s theater company in North America. The
three sisters are from the Kuna and Rappahannock nations. These versatile
performers have performed together and separately around the world. Spiderwoman
takes its name from the Hopi creation goddess Spiderwoman who taught the
people to weave. The sisters call the technique of creating their theatrical
pieces, storyweaving, where they write and perform personal and traditional
stories that are layered with movement, text, sound, music and visual images.
Looking to the next generation, they continue to move forward with their
goal of creating an artistic environment where indigenous arts and culture
thrive as an integrated and vital part of the larger arts community. Among
other awards, in 2005, Spiderwoman Theater was honored with a retrospective
exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the
American Indian in New York City and in 2009, by The American Indian Community
House with the prestigious Honoring the Spirit Award.
Juana Guzmán has been an art activist for over 30 years. From 1979-1999, Guzman served as Director of Community Cultural Development for Chicago’s Department of Cultural, where she developed the Chicago Coalition of Community Cultural Centers; a partnership of sixty-non profit organizations. Since 1999, Guzmán has served as the Vice-President of the National Museum of Mexican Art (NMMA). NMMA is the largest Latino arts institution in the nation. Since 2006, the NMMA has launched more than a dozen programs outside the Chicago area, including exhibitions that toured the US and Mexico and a performing arts festival that honors women. Guzman also serves as an advisor and consultant for the Ford Foundation‘s Building Assets and Community Capacity Initiative. She is working on several projects for them that focus on organizational capacity building, and designing and planning economic development projects utilizing arts, culture and tourism catalyst for social change and social integration.
Karen Reimer is a Chicago based artist who explores notions
of context and limitation by creating embroidered interpretations of contemporary
ephemera, In her work, she implicitly addresses women's work and the construction
of feminine identity through the use of labor-intensive medium of needle
and thread,
Reimers's work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Monique Lelouche
Gallery (2008, 2004), Rochester Art Center (2007), VONZWECK (2007), Beret
International Gallery and Wallspace-New York. Her work has also been featured
in many group shows including 'Raised in Craftivity', Greenlease Gallery
at Rockhurst University, Kansas City, MO (2007) and 'New Embroidery: Not
Your Grandma’s Doily',
Contemporary Crafts Museum & Gallery, Portland, OR (2006). Reimer was recently
featured Art in America (December 2008) Freize magazine
(September 2008), and in the book, 'By Hand: the Use of
Craft in Contemporary Art (2007). Reimer received her MFA from University of Chicago Art and Design
in 1989.
The Women’s Caucus for Art is a national non-profit organization committed to expanding opportunities and recognition for women in the arts. Please check www.nationalwca.org for more details about planned events during WCA’s Conference in 2010.
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Ticket Information: www.nationalwca.org/awards/ticketinfo.html
Please check http://www.nationalwca.org/conference/currentconfer.html for more details about planned events.