MERIDEN, CONNECTICUT.- The Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation has announced the winners of the 2006 Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award which is granted to contemporary art curators in partnership with a museum or an established non-profit exhibition space. The three awardees are the CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, receiving $100,000 for Amateurs to be curated by Ralph Rugoff; El Museo del Barrio in New York, receiving $125,000 for Arte Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960-2000 to be curated by Deborah Cullen; and The Renaissance Society in Chicago receiving $125,000 for Black Is, Black Ain't to be curated by Hamza Walker. The exhibitions will be mounted between 2007 and 2009.

The biennial Exhibition Award‚ established in 1998 to honor Emily Hall Tremaine, a life-long collector of contemporary art‚ rewards innovation and experimentation at the curatorial level by supporting strong thematic exhibitions that challenge audiences and expand the boundaries of contemporary art.

Applications for the Exhibition Award were received from curators working with both established museums and alternative exhibition spaces. The Foundation’s selection was determined through a three-person jury of contemporary art curators including Helen Klisser During, Gallery Director at the Silvermine Guild Arts Center Gallery; Madeleine Grynstejn, Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Valerie Smith, Director of Exhibitions at the Queens Museum of Art.

“The three winning exhibitions are timely and provocative,” said Nicole E. Chevalier, Program Director at the Tremaine Foundation. “Their concepts exemplify Emily Hall Tremaine's passion for contemporary art. The Foundation believes the exhibitions will be sources of discourse for the field just as Emily Hall Tremaine's collection was.”

Past recipients of the Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award include curators Lydia Yee for Street Art, Street Life at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Sylvia Chivaratanond for Skin Tight: The Sensibility of the Flesh at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Betti-Sue Hertz for The Past in Reverse: Contemporary Art of East Asia at the San Diego Museum of Art; Valerie Smith for Down the Garden Path: Artists Gardens Since 1960 at the Queens Museum of Art, New York; Helen Molesworth for Work Ethic at the Baltimore Museum of Art; Jessica Morgan for Art and Healing: Ritual and Transformation at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; John Ravenal for Outer and Inner Space: A Video Exhibition in Three Parts at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; and Christian Eckart, Osvaldo Romberg and Harry Philbrick for Faith: The Impact of Judeo-Christian Religion on Art at the Millennium at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut.

Guidelines for the 2008 Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award will be available at the Tremaine Foundation website, www.tremainefoundation.org, in late 2007.

The Exhibitions:

Amateurs to be curated by Ralph Rugoff
at the CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary Arts, San Francisco

The California College of the Arts Wattis Institute of Contemporary Arts, San Francisco was awarded $100,000 by the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation to mount Amateurs in the spring of 2007. The exhibition is to be organized by guest curator Ralph Rugoff, former director of the CCA Wattis and current director of the Hayward Gallery in London. Against the background of an increasingly professionalized art world, Amateurs will be the first major exhibition to survey recent artworks in which amateurism is embraced as a critical aesthetic strategy and a mode of production. “I am thrilled and delighted by the decision to grant this award for a show that‚in this moment of hyper-professionalism across the art world‚ will explore the crucial and changing relationship between contemporary art and a wide array of amateur visual culture,”said Mr. Rugoff, a curator, writer and editor who served as director of the CCA Wattis from 2000 to 2006, and was also research fellow at Goldsmiths College in London and a Pew Arts Journalism Fellow at Columbia University in New York. “In that very spirit, I am very encouraged that this prestigious award has been given to a smaller non-profit space that emphasizes risk and adventurousness over commercial considerations and rote professionalism.” Rugoff was recently replaced at the CCA Wattis by Jens Hoffman formerly of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.

Arte Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960-2000 to be curated by Deborah Cullen at El Museo del Barrio, New York

El Museo del Barrio, New York, was awarded $125,000 by the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation to mount Arte Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960-2000 in the summer of 2009. To be organized by Deborah Cullen, the museum’s Director of Curatorial Programs, this exhibition will, for the first time, examine the vast array of performative actions produced by Caribbean, Latino, and Latin American artists over the last half-century. “The Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award is very exciting, as it allows El Museo del Barrio to bring a tangible history of groundbreaking Latino and Latin American performative actions to the public for the first time ever, in our newly renovated facility,” said Deborah Cullen, Director of Curatorial Programs at El Museo del Barrio. Ms. Cullen, who has been part of the curatorial team at El Museo for close to ten years, holds her Ph.D from The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. “This has particular resonance for us, because our Founding Director, Rafael Montañez Ortiz, was renowned for his Destructivist performance actions already when the museum was founded in 1969.”

Black Is, Black Ain't to be curated by Hamza Walker at The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago

The Renaissance Society, Chicago, was awarded $125,000 by the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation to mount Black Is, Black Ain't in the fall of 2007. Organized by Hamza Walker, Associate Curator and Director of Education at The Renaissance Society a non-collecting museum devoted to contemporary art at The University of Chicago since 1994, the exhibition takes its cue from a Ralph Ellison quote and explores a shift in the rhetoric of race. “It pays to dream and to flesh out that dream in great detail,” said Mr. Walker, who has been the recipient of the 1999 Norton Curatorial Grant and the 2005 Walter Hopps Award for curatorial achievement, and has written for numerous monographs and publications such as Artforum and Parkett. “Usually you come up with an idea and impose unconscious limitations on it. With the Tremaine Award, it is possible to think about a group show in a way that isn‚ constrained by budget. No one in recent memory has done a group show on race in Chicago. Black Is, Black Ain’t will contribute to an already robust dialogue about race that no doubt will continue.”