BOSTON, MASS.- The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, announced today that Boston-based Annette Lemieux (born 1957) is the recipient of its 2017 Maud Morgan Prize, which honors a Massachusetts woman artist who has demonstrated creativity and vision, and who has made significant contributions to the contemporary arts landscape. Ranging from painting to photography to found-object assemblage, Lemieux’s conceptual works confront urgent subjects such as the horror of war, the nature of time, the elusive truth of memory and the relationship between personal experience and cultural history. Currently a Senior Lecturer on Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, she has influenced younger generations of artists as a teacher for more than 20 years. The Museum has collected Lemieux’s works since the late 1980s, cultivating a sustained belief in her practice. As part of the Prize, the artist will receive a $10,000 award, and an exhibition of her work will be presented at the MFA in the summer.
“Annette is fearless about tackling timely socio-political issues in her artwork. She is a careful observer of the world and a thoughtful commentator on important issues of our time,” said Matthew Teitelbaum, Ann and Graham Gund Director of the MFA. “We look forward to working closely with her and sharing her voice with a wide and appreciative public.”
Born in Norfolk, Virginia, Lemieux received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the Hartford Art School, University of Hartford in 1980. After graduation, she spent a decade in New York City, working as an assistant for artist David Salle and becoming part of a burgeoning scene of appropriation artists—alongside Sarah Charlesworth, Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman—who frequently incorporated text, images, objects and symbols from mass media and pop culture into their work. Her work was featured in the Whitney Biennial in 1987 and 2000, as well as the Venice Biennale in 1990.
Lemieux is the recipient of awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship, Brown University and the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Germany. In 2009 she received an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Montserrat College of Art. Her work has been exhibited internationally and acquired by museums across the United States and Europe. In addition to the MFA, these include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, Tel Aviv Museum of Art and more. Lemieux’s critically acclaimed projects include solo exhibitions Unfinished Business (2012) at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and the mid-career survey The Strange Life of Objects: The Art of Annette Lemieux (2010) at the Worcester Art Museum.
Al Miner, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, will collaborate with Lemieux on her solo 2017 exhibition at the MFA marking the award of the Maud Morgan Prize.
“Annette has long been an admired and beloved fixture in the region’s art scene,” said Miner. “I’m thrilled to be working with an artist so deserving of this distinction. And I especially look forward to introducing audiences to recent MFA acquisitions and to debuting her exciting new body of work, which evidences her staying power.”
