The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts
announces this year's ten winners and celebrates its 30th
anniversary.
SANTA
MONICA, Calif., May 2, 2024
/PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- "I've always loved the artists that travel
the road less traveled…those are the artists that touch me."
Herb Alpert
I've always loved the artists that travel
the road less traveled…those are the artists that touch me.
May 2, 2024 will mark the 30th
anniversary awards celebration of the Herb
Alpert Award in the Arts (HAAIA) which will be presented to
ten risk-taking, mid-career artists – experimenters - who are
challenging and transforming art, their respective disciplines, and
society. Fifteen highly regarded leaders in the arts made up the
panels reviewing the candidates and selected two award recipients
in each of five disciplines: dance, film/video, music, theatre and
visual arts.
The 2024 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts winners:
DANCE: Jonathan González, Mariana
Valencia
FILM/VIDEO: Nuotama Bodomo, Lucy
Raven
MUSIC: Huang Ruo, Anna Webber
THEATRE: Robin Frohardt, Cannupa
Hanska Luger
VISUAL ARTS: Marina Rosenfeld,
Marie Watt
The awards were founded and conceived by legendary musician,
philanthropist and artist Herb
Alpert, and his Grammy-winning vocalist wife, Lani Hall. Now in its 30th year, the HAAIA has
to date been awarded to 174 artists. Each award includes a
$75,000 unrestricted prize and
residency at CalArts (California Institute of
the Arts) which administers the prize on behalf of the Herb
Alpert Foundation.
Herb Alpert and Lani Hall created the Herb Alpert Foundation in
1985 and over thirty-nine years and more than $200 million dollars later, Herb Alpert remains one of America's most
important and loyal advocates for the arts and arts education.
Among the past HAAIA winners are noted artists: Carrie Mae Weems, Taylor
Mac, Suzan-Lori Parks,
Julia Wolfe, Michelle Dorrance, Tania
Bruguera, Kerry James
Marshall, Lisa Kron,
Sharon Lockhart, Ralph Lemon, Arthur
Jafa, Cai Guo-Qiang, Okwui
Okpokwasili and Christian
Scott aTunde Adjuah to name a few.
Irene Borger, Director of HAAIA
since its inception in 1994, reflects on the Award's continued
importance in honoring experimental artists attentive to the
turbulence of American life. "At this moment of increasingly
retrograde laws and maneuvers, Herb Alpert Awardees are engaged in
rigorous investigations, invigorating new forms with deep questions
and propositions for alternative, necessary, and more humane
futures."
Rona Sebastian, President of the
Herb Alpert Foundation added,"Herb and Lani
Alpert continue their decades-long commitment to support
those art makers and performing artists who, in grappling with our
challenging world, are creating innovative, vital, and necessary
work."
"The generosity of Herb and Lani is legendary, and their work
supporting artists to take risks, through The Alpert Awards, has
propelled artmaking in this country for decades, " said CalArts
President Ravi Rajan. "The list of
past honorees is testament to how the award gives artists the space
and time to create work that transforms the world."
The following summaries highlight why the 2024 panelists chose
these ten extraordinary artists:
DANCE PANEL SUMMARY
The Dance panel celebrates choreographer Jonathan González for his
"compelling, provocative work, his commitment to collaborating with
artists of different disciplines, bringing together different
bodies, for his thoughtful, generous relationship with audiences,
and the ways he has created 'beautiful chaos.'"
The Dance panel honors choreographer Mariana Valencia's "rigorous, intelligent, work,
riveting performances, and beautiful movement. She magically
accesses the political through the deeply personal, expanding dance
beyond the studio and leaving audiences alchemically transformed to
reflect on and expand into a larger, political conversation."
DANCE PANELISTS
John Andress, Bill T. Jones Director
and Curator of Performing Arts,
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston,
MA
Stanford Makishi, Vice President
& Artistic Director, Dance, New
York City Center, New York, NY
Charmaine Warren, Founder/Artistic
Director, Black Dance Stories;
Dance on the Lawn-Montclair Dance Festival; Producer,
DanceAfrica@BAM; former curator, E-Moves Harlem Stage,
Montclair, NJ
FILM/VIDEO PANEL SUMMARY
The Film/Video panel recognizes filmmaker Nuotama Bodomo for the
"uniquely propositional core of her practice and its commitment to
a specificity of voices, for her vision without compromise." They
"appreciate her drive to locate other grounds for speaking, not in
opposition to but in an unrelenting attempt to actualize the
impossible, to re-learn to speak from scratch."
Moved by her "rare mastery of form and sophisticated insistence
on collapsing the contexts between cinema and contemporary art and
her commitment to radical forms of address," the Film/Video panel
celebrates filmmaker and artist Lucy
Raven. "Her work not only understands that history and
lineage of avant-garde and structuralist film, but sees beyond it,
taking film form to new places."
FILM/VIDEO PANELISTS
Pablo de Ocampo, Director and
Curator of Moving Image, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN
Arthur Jafa, artist, filmmaker,
theorist, Herb Alpert Award Artist,
Los Angeles
Leslie Thornton, artist,
Herb Alpert Award Artist,
Croton-on-Hudson, NY
MUSIC PANEL SUMMARY
The Music panel honors composer Huang
Ruo for his "substantial and meaningful body of work, his
choice of subject matter, compelling collaborations, carefully
considered contexts, and strong voice." They "appreciate his
exquisite craft and the inventive ways he continues to mine and
transform multiple musical traditions as well as his sense of both
empathy and responsibility for reanimating what has been misnamed,
forgotten and obscured."
Valuing "her astute multiplicity as both composer and gifted
performer," the Music panel celebrates composer, saxophonist, and
flautist Anna Webber's "deeply
researched and imaginative music" and her "clearly
clearly-thought-through spacious explorations of multiple musical
languages, bringing together – and creatively expanding - what have
often been disparate worlds."
MUSIC PANELISTS
Steve Coleman, musician, composer,
Herb Alpert Award Artist,
Allentown, PA
Adam Fong, composer, San Francisco, CA
Julia Wolfe, composer, Herb Alpert Award Artist, New York, NY
THEATRE PANEL SUMMARY
Theatre artist Robin Frohardt was
selected by the Theatre Panel for the ways in which "her rigor,
detail, and whimsy envelop, guide, humor, and move us." They thank
her for "not scaling back her imagination, for blending her
artistic practices into meticulously-crafted singular expressions.
complex, BIG ideas illuminated by the quotidian." In her work, they
see "an intrinsic understanding of the direction we need to head
towards – both in theatre and in the world beyond - for our
survival as a field and as a species."
Interdisciplinary artist Cannupa Hanska Luger is being
celebrated by the Theatre panel for "intersecting the social and
political dynamics with purposive spectacle, for his intense and
expansive work's aesthetic beauty which acts as an elixir to
simultaneously enhance and coat its power. His work expands the
construct of performance, infusing symbology and ancestral
tradition with protest. A knife to the throat of humanity, these
provocations demand action."
THEATRE PANELISTS
Nataki Garrett, co-artistic
director, One Nation/One Project,
San Francisco Bay
Maria Goyanes, artistic director,
Woolly Mammoth Theater, Washington,
DC
Meiyin Wang, Director of Producing
and Programming, Perelman Performing Arts Center, New York, NY
VISUAL ARTS PANEL SUMMARY
Artist Marina Rosenfeld was chosen
Visual Arts prizewinner for "the rigorousness of her practice, and
commitment to developing new strategies and expanding the limits of
known forms." They were impressed by "her experimental gestures
through sound and composition in creating complex structures via
elegant formal means." They view the way her "deeply felt" projects
are "rooted in sensation, creating playful spaces which push the
boundaries of communication and understanding."
Artist Marie Watt was named
Visual Arts prizewinner for "the ways she activates community,
histories, and Indigenous ideas through materials which become more
fully alive through performance and interactivity. Viewing "the
constellation of interconnectedness at the center of her practice
as a very powerful and deeply rooted methodology," they appreciate
the way her "life-affirming work facilitates spaces of collective
listening and making through her open and generous practice."
VISUAL ARTS PANELISTS
Ruth Estévez, independent curator and writer, New York and Mexico
City.
Emily Jacir, artist, Herb Alpert Award Artist, Bethlehem and Rome
Tanya Lukin Linklater, artist,
Herb Alpert Award Artist, Nbisiing
Anishnaabeg aki
The 30th HAAIA awards celebration will be held virtually
on Thursday, May 2, 2024
Media Contact
Caroline Graham, C4 Global
Communications, 310-487-2881, caroline@c4global.com
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