Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture announces 2018 Awards Dinner and Honorees
Celebrating exceptional talent and outstanding dedication to the visual arts, Skowhegan will present four awards: the Skowhegan Medal for Painting, to Peter Doig; the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, to Betye Saar; the Governors' Award for Outstanding Service to Artists, to b and the Inaugural Skowhegan Impact Award, to ArtPlace America and Jamie Bennett, Executive Director.
About the Honorees
Peter Doig (F ’07) will receive a Skowhegan Medal for Painting, presented by Chris Ofili (F ’10). Peter Doig was born in Edinburgh in 1959 and raised in Trinidad and Canada before settling in London in 1979 to study painting. Doig is recognized as one of the most inventive artists painting today. Few artists of his generation have done as much to explore the evocative possibilities of painting and its capacity for depth and meaning. Drawn from various sources including personal snapshots and popular film, Doig’s paintings are by turns melancholic and hallucinatory. Over a career spanning more than three decades, Doig has been the subject of a number of major exhibitions worldwide, including a mid-career survey organized by Tate Britain in 2008. In 2013 the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, organized No Foreign Lands, a critically lauded exhibition focused on recurrent motifs in Doig’s paintings; the exhibition later traveled to Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montreal. In 2015, an exhibition devoted to the artist’s paintings and prints was on view at Louisiana Museum in Humlebæk, Denmark, after originating at Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland in 2014. Doig lives and works in Trinidad.
Betye Saar (F ’85, ’14) will be awarded the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, presented by Alison Saar (F ’93). Born in Los Angeles, Saar is celebrated for her multimedia collages, assemblages, altars and installations consisting of found materials. Saar has received numerous awards including two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1974, 1984), a J. Paul Getty Fund for the Visual Arts Fellowship (1990), and a Flintridge Foundation Visual Artists Award (1998). Included among Saar’s numerous exhibitions are: Betye Saar: Extending the Frozen Moment, a major traveling exhibit organized by the University of Michigan Museum of Art (2005); Betye Saar: Still Tickin’, Museum Het Domein, Sittard, The Netherlands; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale,
AZ (2015); Betye Saar Black White/Blend, Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA (2016); Uneasy Dancer, Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy (2016), Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, Tate Modern, London; Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Bentonville, AR; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY (2017-2018); We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85, California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (2017-2018); and Outliers and American Vanguard Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA (2018-2019). In Fall 2018, Saar will mount her sixth solo exhibition at Roberts Projects (formerly Roberts & Tilton) Culver City, CA.
Barbara Lapcek, Skowhegan Executive Director, Program from 1984-1996, will be awarded the Governors’ Award for Outstanding Service to Artists. Born in Yonkers in 1933 and a graduate of Barnard College, Lapcek began her career in the arts as the Founder and Executive Director of The Nommo Art Gallery, opened in 1964. Located in Kampala, Uganda, Nommo was the first art gallery in all of East Africa and continues to flourish today. On returning to America, Lapcek worked in an art program that brought visual artists and writers to New York State prisons and hospitals (1974-1977); at the New York State Artists Fellowship Program as Director of CAPS (1977-1982).
ArtPlace America and Jamie Bennett, Executive Director will receive the inaugural Skowhegan Impact Award, presented by Shaun Leonardo (A ’04). ArtPlace America (ArtPlace) is a ten-year collaboration among a number of foundations, federal agencies, and financial institutions that works to position arts and culture as a core sector of comprehensive community planning and development in order to help strengthen the social, physical, and economic fabric of communities.
Bennett has been the Executive Director of ArtPlace America since January 2014. Previously, Jamie served as Chief of Staff at the National Endowment for the Arts and Chief of Staff at the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. He has also provided strategic counsel at the Agnes Gund Foundation; served as chief of staff to the President of Columbia University; and worked in fundraising at The Museum of Modern Art, the New York Philharmonic, and Columbia College. His past nonprofit affiliations have included the Board of Directors of Art21 and the HERE Arts Center; the Foot-in-the-Door Committee of the Merce Cunningham Dance Foundation; and Studio in a School’s Associates Committee.
For over 70 years, Skowhegan has brought together emerging and established artists on its remote Maine campus for an intense and immersive summer of artmaking. The early roster of impressive attendees—paired with the founders’ commitment to aesthetic and intellectual freedom—established the school as a prominent force in American art. Today, it remains a profound experience where artists can push the boundaries of their practice and learn from a diverse group of peers and mentors within a rural landscape steeped in the legacy of those artists who came before.
A – Skowhegan Alumni
F – Skowhegan Faculty
Attendance at the dinner is ticketed and by pre-registration only.
