Skowhegan announces the 2022 Awards Dinner honoring Byron Kim and the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation & Jack Cowart
Courtesy of Christiana Rifaat.
NEW YORK, NY (September 20, 2022) — Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, one of the country’s foremost educational experiences for artists, will hold its 52nd annual Awards Dinner at Guastavino's on Wednesday, October 26, 2022. Skowhegan will honor artist Byron Kim (A '86, F '99, '13) with the Skowhegan Medal for Painting, presented by artist Glenn Ligon (F '98, '15). The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation & Jack Cowart, founding executive director, will receive the Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Award for Outstanding Patronage of the Arts, presented by artist Carmen Winant (A '10).
The 2022 Awards Dinner is chaired by artists Janine Antoni F '98 and Victoria Fu A '06, as well as Bernard I. Lumpkin & Carmine D. Boccuzzi; BB & Jud Reis; and Paula Volent. An after-party with performances to be announced is co-chaired by artists Chase Hall A ‘19 and Ashley Teamer A ‘14 and Morgan Aguiar-Lucander; Desiree Almodovar; Ashley Artis; and Jasmine Wahi.
Awards Dinner proceeds support Skowhegan's program, including the scholarships that are provided to 95% of all attending artists.
ABOUT THE HONOREES
Byron Kim, Skowhegan Medal for Painting. Kim works in an area one might call the abstract sublime. His work sits at the threshold between abstraction and representation, between conceptualism and pure painting. In his richly hued, minimalist works, Kim seeks to push the edges of what we understand as abstract painting by using the medium to develop an idea that typically gets worked out over the course of an ongoing series. Kim’s paintings often appear to be pure abstractions but reveal a charged space that often connects to the artist’s personal experiences in relation to larger cultural forces.
Byron Kim (b. 1961) is a Senior Critic at Yale University and the Co-director of Yale Norfolk School of Art. He received a BA from Yale University (1983) and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1986). Kim’s numerous awards include the Louise Nevelson Award in Art (1993), the National Endowment of the Arts Award (1995), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (1997), the Alpert Award in the Arts (2008), the Guggenheim Fellowship (2017), and the Robert de Niro, Sr., Prize (2019). His works are in numerous international permanent collections including the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., SFMOMA, CA and the Tate Modern, London, UK.
Roy Lichtenstein Foundation & Jack Cowart, Founding Executive Director, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Award for Outstanding Patronage of the Arts. Dr. Cowart has led the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation for over 23 years, following roles as Deputy Director/Chief Curator of the Corcoran Gallery of Art (1992–99) and Head of the Department of 20th-Century Art at the National Gallery of Art (1983–92), as well as museum curatorial posts in St. Louis and Hartford.
Dr. Cowart received his PhD in the history of art from the Johns Hopkins University (1972), and
is a widely published and recognized authority on Roy Lichtenstein and Henri Matisse, as well as on other American and European twentieth-century modern and contemporary art and artists. He was made a Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication in 2001.
By the wishes of the artist and his family, the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation was chartered as a Private Operating Foundation in 1998, primarily to facilitate public access to the work of Roy Lichtenstein and the art and artists of his time; to create a catalogue raisonné of all known Lichtenstein works; and to share information which could assist the development and education of the next generations of curators, critics and scholars concerning the artist Roy Lichtenstein.
During the last fifteen years the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation has expanded its activities to include: the rescue, organization and donation of the enormous and historically consequential Shunk-Kender and Harry Shunk Photography Collections to a consortium of five international museums/research centers; consistent support of the Aspen Institute National Study of Artist-Endowed Foundations; providing expertise to numerous Lichtenstein exhibitions; supporting numerous outreach and research topics, including artists’ materials and postwar art and art history; building a Study Collection of early Lichtenstein and later generative sketches, models, maquettes and artifacts; functioning as an image and information database for a broad range of art, art history and oral histories; and working with museums to acquire notable Lichtenstein artworks from the Foundation’s collections and the collections of others. The foundation created an endowment at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art to process and digitize material on art and artists from historically underrepresented groups in the Archives’ collections and the American canon, making them broadly available online. And it made significant philanthropic contributions to benefit the next generations of curators and educators. This includes two endowed professorships at The Ohio State University (the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Endowed Chair of Art History and the Roy Lichtenstein Endowed Chair of Studio Art); and most recently, the Lichtenstein Foundation Curatorial Fellowship for Diversity and Inclusion in the Arts at the Columbus Museum of Art.