Awards
2004 Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work
Krzysztof Wodiczko
Krzysztof Wodiczko
Each year CAA presents this award to an artist for exceptional work in exhibitions, presentations, and/or performances mounted between September 1 and August 31. This year, the award committee honors Krzysztof Wodiczko for his distinguished achievement. We take great pleasure in honoring an artist who is a social advocate, a gifted teacher and lecturer, and an effective and powerful author.
Wodiczko is a highly original avant-garde artist whose public artworks bring new life to city environments internationally, from New York to Berlin to Hiroshima. Using large-scale slide and video projections on architectural façades and monuments, he consistently challenges the viewer to question intellectually one’s own prejudice while giving a space and a voice to marginalized members of society. Since the late 1980s, the artist has developed a series of wearable “instruments,” which incorporate devices such as LCD screens, video cameras, speakers, and microphones, for homeless and immigrant users. These works convey personal history and information and function as implements for survival, communication, empowerment, and healing.
During the past year, Wodiczko’s work has been shown in Designs for the Real World at the Generali Foundation in Vienna; Arte/Cidade Zona leste in São Paulo; Micro Politicas: Arte y Cotidianidad at Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castello in Castello, Spain; Aliens in America, Others in the USA at the Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, NH; Bright Lights, Big City at David Zwirner in New York; and Strangers: The First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video at the International Center of Photography in New York.
Krzysztof Wodiczko, Aegi: Equipment for a City of Strangers, 1998, mixed media, dimensions variable (artwork © Krzysztof Wodiczko; photograph provided by the artist and Galerie Lelong, New York)
His projects have been exhibited at the Bienal de São Paulo (1965, 1967, 1985), Documenta (1977, 1987), the Venice Biennale (1986, 2000), and the Whitney Biennial (2000). In 1998, he was awarded the Hiroshima Peace Prize.
Wodiczko was born in Warsaw, Poland, and studied industrial design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. His work involves the investigation of strategies of communication in the public sphere. He is currently professor of visual arts, head of the Interrogative Design Group, and director of ACT, the center for Art, Culture, and Technology, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Wodiczko’s recent book is Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects, Interviews (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), and his essay “Krzystof Wodiczko: Instruments, Projections, Monuments” was published in AA Files 43, the journal of London’s Architectural Association School of Architecture. An interview with the artist appears in the winter 2003 issue of Art Journal.
Committee: Austin I. Collins, Notre Dame, chair; Todd Ayoung, independent artist; Josely Carvalho, independent artist; and Margot Lovejoy, Purchase College, State University of New York.
