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| Kara Walker |
The Smithsonian American Art Museum announced recently that Columbia professor Kara Walker won its annual Lucelia Artist Award, which is given to a leading contemporary American artist younger than 50. The prestigious award, created in 2001 and funded by the New York-based Lucelia Foundation, has a $25,000 honorarium. Walker, an associate professor of visual arts at Columbia's School of the Arts, expressed her gratitude for the award by saying, "It'll be a great help for my studio practice."
Walker is best known for her large-scale silhouettes through which she examines slavery, race and the old South. Her provocative work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art , the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1997, she received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship.
" Walker has already influenced a generation of artists and produced an impressive body of challenging work in a relatively short career," the Lucelia jurors wrote in their statement.
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"Influence of the Recent Dead" (2001), mixed media and paper on board.
Credit: Courtesy Brent Sikkema NYC
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Last year's winner of the award was Rirkrit Tiravanija, associate professor of professional practice in Columbia's School of the Arts Visual Arts Division. His works span a range of media and embrace interactivity, inviting the public to eat, cook and sleep.
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