2008 Lifetime Achievement Awardees

The selection committee is proud to announce the following awardees:
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Ida Applebroog
Born in Bronx, NY, Ida Applebroog attended NY State Institute of Applied Arts and Sciences (1949). She moved to Chicago in 1956, later attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1968). After relocating to San Diego, California she attended the first Feminist Artists Conference at Cal Art in l971.  She exhibited in "Invisible/Visible" at Long Beach Art Museum, 1972. In 1973 she taught at the University of California in San Diego before returning to NY.  Starting in 1977 she circulated a series of self-published books through the mail, and joined Heresies/A Feminist Journal on Art and Politics. In 1981 she showed "Applebroog: Silent Stagings", her first exhibition at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NY, where she continued to show for over 20 years.  In 1991, she joined Women's Action Coalition (WAC).  During the decade of the 1990s, she received multiple honors including the College Art Association Distinguished Art Award for Lifetime Achievement, an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts, New School for Social Research/Parsons School of Design.  She also received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1998 and her art was the subject of a retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.  Applebroog’s work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Corcoran Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, and others.  She was profiled in the PBS documentary "Art 21: Art in the Twenty-first Century" (season 3).  Currently, she is producing a new body of work  "Photogenetics".
Photo credit: Emily Poole

Joanna Frueh
Joanna Frueh is an art critic and art historian, a writer, an actress, a singer, and a multidisciplinary and performance artist. Her most recent book is Swooning Beauty: A Memoir of Pleasure (2006). There her trailblazing consciousness continues the exploration of love, eros, sex, beauty, the body, and human relations that appear in her previous books, Monster/Beauty: Building the Body of Love (2001) and Erotic Faculties (1996). Clairvoyance (For Those In The Desert): Performance Pieces 1979-2004, a collection of her essential performance texts, will be published by Duke University Press in December 2007. Other groundbreaking projects include co-curating Picturing the Modern Amazon (New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2000) and being principal co-editor of the book, having the same title, which accompanied the exhibition. Frueh has written extensively on contemporary art and women artists since 1976. Recognized as a powerful performance artist, she has presented performances—as well as lectures—at museums, galleries, universities, and conferences in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the UK. Frueh is Distinguished Professor in the School of Art at the University of Arizona and Professor Emerita of Art History at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Photo credit: Dean Burton

Nancy Grossman
Nancy Grossman Born in New York City, Nancy Grossman grew up on a working farm in Oneonta, New York. Life on a farm with parents in the garment industry would shape Grossman’s artistic visions and strongly influence her choice of materials, which frequently include fabric and leather. Grossman studied at Pratt Institute with Richard Lindner, receiving her BFA in 1962. Immediately, she began receiving grants and awards such as Pratt’s Ida C. Haskell Award for Foreign Travel (1962) and a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1965-66). The accolades have continued throughout her career and include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1984), a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (1991), a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (1996-97), and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2001). Grossman is represented in numerous museum collections including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Museum of American Art, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, is the exclusive representative of Nancy Grossman.
Photo credit: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Leslie King-Hammond
A nationally respected scholar, educator, author, curator and visual artist in her own right who has organized countless exhibitions, Dr. Leslie King-Hammond is Dean of Graduate Studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. She is a professor of art history and has curated a number of exhibitions. The former president of the College Art Association, Dr. King-Hammond serves on the Executive Board of the International Association of Art Critics. Her articles and books include "Art as a Verb," "Black Printmakers and the WPA," and "Three Generations of African American Women Sculptors: A Study in Paradox." Additionally, she has written catalog essays for a number of important exhibitions. Since 2006, she has chaired the exhibits and collections committee of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture. Her art has been exhibited widely and was recently featured in "The Art of 9/11," curated by critic Arthur Danto at apexart in New York City, in "Legacies: Contemporary Artists Reflect on Slavery," curated by Lowery Stokes Sims at the New York Historical Society, in New York City, and in the traveling exhibitions "Collaboration as a Medium: 25 Years of Pyramid Atlantic" and "It's for the Birds," organized by the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in Miami.

Yolanda M. López
Yolanda M. López is an American muralist, painter, printmaker, educator, and film producer. Her work focuses on the experience of Mexican American women and often challenges ethnic stereotypes associated with them. López obtained international celebrity for her Virgen de Guadalupe series of paintings. The series, which depicted "ordinary" Mexican women (including her grandmother and López herself) with Guadalupan attributes (usually the mandorla). She continued her artistic investigation of women's labor issues with a series of prints called Woman's Work is Never Done. López has also curated exhibitions, including "Cactus Hearts/Barb Wired Dreams", which featured works of art concerning immigration to the United States. The exhibition debuted at the Galería de la Raza and subsequently toured nationwide as part of an exhibition called "La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexico/United States Border Experience.” López has produced two films, Images of Mexicans in the Media and When you Think of Mexico, which challenge the way the mass media depicts Mexicans and other Latin Americans. She has also taught art in studios and universities, including University of California, San Diego and the University of California, Berkeley.
Photo credit: Joe Ramos

Lowery Stokes Sims
Lowery Stokes Sims is currently adjunct curator for the permanent collection at The Studio Museum in Harlem and Visiting Professor at Queens College, the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and Cornell University. During the Spring 2007 she was a fellows at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Sims served as Executive Director and then President of The Studio Museum in Harlem from 2000-2006. Prior to 2000, she was Curator of Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she worked since 1972 as an educator and curator. She holds a B.A. in art history from Queens College of the City University of New York, her M.A. in art history from Johns Hopkins University.  Sims received her Ph.D. in art history from the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York.  Sims has received numerous honorary degrees and has written and lectured extensively on modern and contemporary artists, with a special interest in African, Latino, Native and Asian American artists.  In 1991 she received the Frank Jewett Mather Award from the College Art Association for distinction in art criticism.  She is currently on the boards of the Art Matters and Tiffany Foundations and Art 21 and is a founding and current board member of ArtTable. Sims has served in the New York City Commission on Women, The New York State Council on the Arts, and as chair of the Cultural Institutions Group, a coalition of 34 museums, historical societies, zoos and botanical gardens in New York City.
Photo credit Courtesy of The Cleveland Museum of Art