The Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) is pleased to announce the recipients for the 2015 WCA Lifetime Achievement Awards: Kiki Smith, Martha Wilson and Sue Coe. The recipient for the 2015 President’s Art & Activism Award is Petra Kuppers. The WCA Lifetime Achievement Awards were first presented in 1979 in President Jimmy Carter’s Oval Office to Isabel Bishop, Selma Burke, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, and Georgia OKeeffe. The Awards were the first awards recognizing the contribution of women to the arts and their profound effect on society. Today, the Lifetime Achievement Awards continue to honor women, their work, their vision and their commitment. Recent honorees have represented the full range of distinguished achievement in the visual arts professions from Tina Dunkley to Judy Chicago to Carolee Schneemann to Phyllis Bramson. This year’s awardees are no exception, with considerable accomplishment, achievement, and contributions to the visual arts represented by their professional efforts. In addition to the Lifetime Achievement Awards, the President’s Art & Activism Award is presented each year to an emerging or mid-career women whose life and work exemplifies WCA’s mission of creating community through art, education, and social activism. The award anticipates a lifetime of achievement for its recipients. Please join us for the Awards celebration on Thursday February 12, 2014 in New York, New York. The Awards celebration will be held at the New York Institute of Technology Auditorium on Broadway in New York, New York. The gala event will kick-off with a ticketed cocktail reception from 5:30-7:00pm. The ticketed reception will include three food stations, butlered treats, an open bar, and the opportunity to congratulate the awardees. The Awards ceremony (free and open to the public) will take place from 7:30-9:00pm and a coffee and dessert reception will follow from 9:00-10:00pm. The celebration is held during the annual Women’s Caucus for Art and College Art Association conferences. More information on the event (and to purchase tickets) will be available soon at nationalwca.org 2015 Lifetime Achievement Honorees Sue Coe is considered one of the foremost political artists working today. Born in England in 1951, she moved to New York in the early 1970s. In the years that followed, she was featured on the cover of Art News and in numerous museum exhibitions, including a retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington. In 2013 she was awarded the prestigious Dickinson College Arts Award in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. A firm believer in the power of the media to effect change, Coe has seen her work published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and countless other periodicals. Similarly, Coe sees printmaking as a way to reach a broad audience. Accessible and affordable, Sue Coe’s etchings, lithographs and woodcuts have become extremely popular. Over the course of a career spanning more than forty years, Coe has consistently focused on the oppression of the weak by the strong. Her seminal 1983 book How to Commit Suicide in South Africa was used as an anti-apartheid organizing tool on college campuses nationwide. She followed up with a pictorial biography of Malcolm X, X, in 1986. The catalogue for her 1987 traveling retrospective, Police State, and her 2004 book Bully! Master of the Global Merry-Go-Round both document political tyranny. Coe has spent two decades investigating the atrocities committed by people against animals. She warned, early on, of the dangers inherent in genetically modified crops, the environmental costs of meat production and the extreme cruelty entailed in factory farming. Her publications on these subjects include Dead Meat (1996), Pit’s Letter (2000), Sheep of Fools…A Song Cycle for Five Voices (2005), Cruel (2013) and The Ghosts of Our Meat (2013). Kiki Smith (b.1954, Nuremberg, Germany) is an artist of international recognition whose career has spanned over three decades. She is a leading figure among artists addressing the human condition, the body, and the realms of spirituality and nature in work spanning mediums from sculpture and printmaking to installation and textiles. Smith’s many accolades include, most recently, the U.S. State Department Medal of Arts given by Hillary Clinton (2012), Theo Westenberger Women of Excellence Award (2010); Nelson A. Rockefeller Award, Purchase College School of the Arts (2010); Women in the Arts Award, Brooklyn Museum (2009) and the 50th Edward MacDowell Medal (2009), among many others. Smith was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York in 2005. In 2006 TIME Magazine named her one of the “TIME 100: The People Who Shape Our World.” Kiki Smith lives and works in New York City. She has been represented by Pace Gallery since 1994. Martha Wilson (b. 1947) is a pioneering feminist artist and gallery director, who over the past four decades created innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity through role-playing, costume transformations, and “invasions” of other people’s personae. She began making these videos and photo/text works in the early 1970s while in Halifax in Nova Scotia, and further developed her performative and video-based practice after moving in 1974 to New York City, embarking on a long career that would see her gain attention across the U.S. for her provocative appearances and works. In 1976 she also founded and continues to direct Franklin Furnace, an artist-run space that champions the exploration, promotion and preservation of artists’ books, installation art, video, onliine and performance art, further challenging institutional norms, the roles artists play within society, and expectations about what constitutes acceptable art mediums. Wilson, a native of Newtown, Pennsylvania, who has lived in New York since 1974, is esteemed for both her solo artistic production and her maverick efforts to champion creative forms that are “vulnerable due to institutional neglect, their ephemeral nature, or politically unpopular content.” As a performance artist she founded and collaborated with DISBAND, the all-girl punk conceptual band of women artists who can’t play any instruments, and impersonated political figures such as Alexander M. Haig, Jr., Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush and Tipper Gore. In 2008 she had her first solo exhibition in New York at Mitchell Algus Gallery, “Martha Wilson: Photo/Text Works, 1971-74.” In 2009, “Martha Wilson: Staging the Self,” an exhibition of Ms. Wilson’s early photo/text work and one project from each of Franklin Furnace’s first 30 years, began international travel under the auspices of ICI (Independent Curators International); and in 2011, ICI published the Martha Wilson Sourcebook: 40 Years of Reconsidering Performance, Feminism, Alternative Spaces. Martha Wilson joined P.P.O.W Gallery, New York, and mounted a solo exhibition, “I have become my own worst fear,” in September, 2011. 2015 President’s Awardees for Art & Activism Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist, a community performance artist, and director of The Olimpias, a disability culture collective. She teaches in Performance Studies and Disability Studies at the University of Michigan, and on the low-residency MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College.
Posted on: Wed, 01 Oct 2014 01:43:18 +0000