The Herb Alpert Foundation and the California Institute of the Arts have announced the five winners of this year’s Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, which recognizes midcareer artists working in the fields of visual art, film and video, music, theater, and dance
The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts is an unrestricted prize of $75,000 given annually to five risk-taking mid-career artists working in the fields of dance, film/video, music, theatre and the visual arts.
In addition to the prize money, the artists will be invited to participate in a one-week residency at CalArts. They will also be honored at a celebration hosted by the Herb Alpert Foundation in New York City on Monday, May 13. Commenting on this year’s cohort, Irene Borger, director of the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, said: “The artists the Herb Alpert Award honors and supports not only ‘think outside the box,’ they think: What...Box?”
Artist-poet Cecilia Vicuña creates songs, performances, installations, paintings, films, written works, books, lectures, and sculptures. Born in Chile, profoundly impacted by the encouraging time of Allende, the subsequent terrors of Pinochet and decades lived in exile, Vicuña makes work that is always attentive to ethics, the earth, and history. Her object making includes “precarios” - precarious works - composed of fragile materials, (sticks, feathers, leaves, stones, bones…) that disappear, regenerating the life force, and major large-scale installations of “quipus,” dyed wool and fibers inspired by the complex Andean recordkeeping system of sets of knotted cords, a forgotten system she transforms into poems in space, tactile representations of the interconnectedness between cosmological, natural, and human realms. Her improvisatory, participatory performances, often associated with site-specific installations, emphasize the collective nature of action and creativity to bring forth justice, balance and transformation of the world.
An artist working primarily in film and video, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz has created a body of trenchant, poetic work thoroughly dedicated to imagining not only a decolonized Caribbean but alternative ways of seeing and representation. Influenced by Boalian theater, experimental ethnography, and feminist film histories, she has likened her often improvisatory way of working with non-actors – (both performer and filmmaker go through a process of discovery and invention during the focused and heightened state of making) – to musical improvisation, ritual and dance as well as to a psychoanalytic session. Moved by the poetics of everyday life and the power and subtleties of place which contain layers of history, she has a deep and longtime relationship with the landscapes of Puerto Rico, (including the scarred-by-military terrain of Vieques), aware of how her home has been represented visually, by outsiders, in very limited ways. In addition to the films and videos, which include an exploration of the sacred in a Haitian market place, and narratives of factory closings, a murder, and accidental death, since 2013, she has been organizing Walking Seminars for filmmakers, theorists, curators, activists and others, walking through areas of Puerto Rico, being with and listening to place, perceiving sensorially, awakening a deepening of attention.
Moved to experiment with look and form, she continues to re-imagine not only the way images are placed next to one another, and the relationship between camera operator and subject, but also the space of the projection and who the created-for audience might be. Santiago Muñoz is both metaphorically and literally putting into motion a process of seeing differently as an important tool for imagining a different future.
Entrada actualizada el el 13 may de 2019
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