NEW YORK, NY.- The National Academy Museum and School honored eighteen American artists and architects who were elected in 2010 as members of the 185-year old institution. Academicians are elected by peer artists and architects who are members of the Academy.
The newly elected Academicians, as Academy members are known, work in a broad range of styles and media. They are:
Janine Antoni, Adam Anuszkiewicz, Willard Boepple, Donna Dennis, Carroll Dunham, Garth Evans, Nancy Friese, Ann Gale, Ann Hamilton, Glenn Ligon, Melissa Meyer, Dana Schutz, Shahzia Sikander, Amy Sillman, Lee Tribe, Billie Tsien and Tod Williams, and Don Voisine.
Robert Storr, Dean of the Yale University School of Art, was Honorary Master of Ceremonies of the induction ceremony, which was held on October 13, 2010.
2010 National Academy Inductees
Janine Antoni (b. 1964)
Ms. Antoni’s process-based art transcends categorization: she incorporates everyday activities such as eating, bathing, and sleeping into her art making practice. Antoni’s primary tool for making sculpture has always been her own body, and she has addressed issues of materiality, the body, and cultural perceptions of femininity in her work.
Adam Anuszkiewicz (b. 1962)
Mr. Anuszkiewicz is an architect who has designed a number of commercial and public spaces. He was a senior design associate for Robert A. M. Stern Architects before becoming a Principal in the architectural firm of Pfeiffer Partners Architects. He currently heads his own practice in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY.
Willard Boepple (b. 1945)
Mr. Boepple’s sculpture in wood, metal, and resin extends the language of modernism and is inspired by such utilitarian objects as ladders, cogs, and other mechanical objects. Boepple employs a reductive three-dimensional language of abstraction to create vaguely familiar objects that engage with notions of scale and human interaction.
Donna Dennis (b. 1942)
Painter, sculptor, and installation artist Donna Dennis is interested in how we interact with architectural spaces and through her works elicits site-based memory and emotion. Dennis emerged as a painter, but she has become best known as an installation artist with scaled-down installations of cabins, hotels, and subway cars.
Carroll Dunham (b. 1949)
Painter Carroll Dunham emerged in the post-minimal era of the 1970s and was influenced by process and conceptual art. Initially working abstractly, Dunham has since developed a stylized cartoon-like figurative language of painting that is at once raucous and humorous.
Garth Evans (b. 1934)
British-born abstract sculptor Garth Evans has worked in both geometric and more biomorphic languages to create sculptures that expand upon the modernist vernacular. His three-dimensional, vaguely figural, process-based works are metaphors of the sensual explorations of one’s body.
Nancy Friese (b. 1948)
Landscape painter and printmaker Nancy Friese creates explosively colorful compositions derived from life. Her paintings illustrate the artist’s concerns with the shifting tensions between dark and light on ever-changing landscapes and are inspired by such diverse regions as Japan, southern France and coastal New England.
Ann Gale (b. 1966)
Figure painter Ann Gale creates portraits that explore the psychology and sexuality of both artist and subject. Working directly from the figure, Gale’s process is slow and methodical, and her intimate contact with the model often leads to the sitter’s dematerialization. Her portraits both acknowledge and carry forward earlier figurative traditions.
Ann Hamilton (b. 1956)
Ann Hamilton is a visual artist recognized for the sensory surrounds of her large-scale multi-media installations. Using time as process and material, her methods of making art serve as an invocation of place, of lost collective voices, of communities past, and of labor present. Her works are often sensory experiences that also engage notions of memory, imagination, comprehension, and reason in the viewer.
Glenn Ligon (b. 1960)
Glenn Ligon is known for his resonant works in multiple media that explore issues surrounding race, sexuality, representation and language. He frequently uses evocative text, quotations from culturally charged and historically relevant material by writers such as James Baldwin, Jean Genet and Zora Neale Hurston, both as a source of imagery and a means of addressing the politics of representation.
Melissa Meyer (b. 1947)
Abstract painter Melissa Meyer emerged in the 1970s while working with Miriam Schapiro to create feminist collages known as “femmages.” She was always rooted, however, in the language of abstract painting, and her most recent gestural paintings are filled with colorful, layered, and densely applied glyphs that make unforgettable collage-like lyrical abstractions.
Dana Schutz (b. 1976)
As one of the more celebrated painters of her generation, Dana Schutz has revived interest in narrative figurative painting. She has developed an intricate cast of characters in her colorful expressionistic paintings that depict both the mundane and fantastical.
Shahzia Sikander (b. 1969)
Specializing in traditional Indian and Persian miniature painting, Pakistani-born Shahzia Sikander brings a Western dimension to the ancient art form, infusing it with a renewed contemporary interest. Sikander has worked both in small and large scale. By engaging in issues surrounding Islam, she seeks to subvert Western stereotypes through her work.
Amy Sillman (b. 1954)
Painter Amy Sillman’s work teeters on the edge of abstraction. She has become an immensely influential figure for younger generations of artists, and her most recent large gestural abstract paintings acknowledge her debt to previous generations of painters. Sillman’s paintings are tactile and textured, and her enigmatic lexicon of shapes and appendages suggest both a serious and humorous psychosexual narrative.
Lee Tribe (b. 1945)
Lee Tribe’s welded metal sculpture employs the Modernish language handed down from Julio Gonzalez, David Smith, and British sculptors such as Anthony Caro, under whom Tribe studied. Tribe learned to weld on the docks of East London in the 1960s and has since created a highly personal vocabulary of forms in hybrid works that suggest primordial states of life.
Don Voisine (b. 1952)
Don Voisine’s paintings employ a rigorous language of abstraction. Emerging in the early 1980s with paintings based on the floor plans of architectural spaces, Voisine has since focused on a limited selection of more clearly defined hard edge geometric forms that he combines in numerous ways to create subtly suggestive visual anagrams.
Tod Williams (b. 1943) and Billie Tsien (b. 1949)
The architect team of Tod Williams (b. 1943) and Billie Tsien (b. 1949) have created some of the most profound and transcendent architectural spaces in recent memory. Their philosophy in designing spaces is that architecture can be an act of profound optimism. Some recent projects include the Neurosciences Institute, La Jolla, California, American Folk Art Museum, New York, and the forthcoming Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia.
