Awards
2005 CWA Annual Recognition Awards
CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA) will honor two outstanding women—the visual artist Beverly Buchanan and the art historian and curator Lowery Stokes Sims—at its tenth annual Recognition Awards Ceremony during the CAA Annual Conference in Atlanta on Friday, February 18, 2005, from 7:00–8:30 AM (in Salon II, Marquis Ballroom, Convention Level, Marriot Hotel); tickets are available in advance and on-site. Please join us in celebrating their amazing and continuing careers.
Beverly Buchanan
Beverly Buchanan
With the location of the 2005 Annual Conference in Atlanta in mind, the committee is pleased to recognize the lifetime achievement of an artist whose images of Southern living have brought dignity and beauty to the lives of the very poor. The artist Beverly Buchanan is best known for her body of work on the “shack,” an elemental structure that houses the have-nots of society. Treating shacks not as documentary rebuffs but instead as images of endurance and personal history, Beverly has made the simple, rustic, dilapidated house the subject of many paintings and sculptural constructions treated with bright colors or childlike simplicity. Her works evoke the warmth and happiness that can be found even in the meanest dwelling, representing the faith and caring that is not reserved for privileged classes.
Born in 1940, Buchanan grew up in South Carolina, where her father served as professor of agriculture at South Carolina State College, the only state college for African American students. She studied at Columbia University in New York in the 1960s, earning a master’s degree in public health in 1968. Although she began working in New Jersey in health education, Buchanan had always loved making art, and in 1977 she made the decision to pursue it full time. She was awarded both John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) fellowships in 1980. Images of rural South Carolina resonated strongly for Buchanan, and she began balancing the visual tightrope of reality and memory by painting mental reconstructions of what she had seen, incorporating her sense of the history of stray and abandoned buildings as shelters, homes, and sites of struggle and refuge. She tries to convey what she calls the “emotional grounding” of a subject, so that she is not limited to purely illustrative descriptions.
Beverly Buchanan, Georgia Shacks with Datura Blooms, 2003, oil pastel on paper, 22 x 30 in. (artwork © Beverly Buchanan)
Buchanan returned to the South in that year and from her new home in Georgia began to expand her theme to portray existing places she visited there, including “the house and its yard and the road behind and across.” Now that her work has progressed to encompass the spaces outside and around the shack sites, she continues to convey her belief in the beauty of the everyday world by painting brilliant splashes of garden colors or close-ups of flowers, and by taking photographs of these hardy little dwellings with their steadfast residents.
Buchanan has since received another NEA fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, a Georgia Women in the Visual Arts award, a Distinguished Alumni Citation Award from Bennett College, and a 2002 Anonymous Was A Woman award. She has exhibited her artwork since 1963 and was first shown in New York in 1976 at A.I.R. Gallery. Buchanan currently is represented by the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in Miami and resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
—Janet T. Marquardt, professor of art history and women’s studies and director of the Art History Study Abroad Program at Eastern Illinois University
Lowery Stokes Sims
Lowery Stokes Sims (photograph by Robert Hale)
For more than thirty years, the renowned art historian, curator, and educator Lowery Stokes Sims has made crucial contributions to redefining the canon of modern art, pointing to a more complex, inclusive, and complete history. Her seminal work on twentieth-century African, Latino, Native, and Asian American artists has inspired numerous art historians, curators, and artists. Sims has served as executive director of the Studio Museum in Harlem since 2000 and was curator of twentieth-century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for nearly twenty years (since 1972). She has been in the forefront of modern art-historical research and scholarship, defining and debating the cultural definitions of visual art and its contexts in her exhibitions and publications. Her importance as a leader and dedicated mentor has been critical for a generation of scholars.
After receiving a BA in art history in 1970 from Queens College, City University of New York, Sims earned an MA in art history at John Hopkins University in 1972. She finished her MPhil and PhD in art history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, in 1995. Sims’s dissertation was recently published as Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923–1992 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002).
At the Metropolitan Museum, Sims organized significant exhibitions on many modern artists, including Ellsworth Kelly, John Marin, Henry Moore, Charles Burchfield, Stuart Davis, Paul Cadmus, Richard Pousette-Dart, and Hans Hofmann. She also coordinated the museum’s venues for traveling exhibitions on Horace Pippin, Francesco Clemente, and Barbara Chase- Riboud. These extensively researched and subtly interpreted exhibitions highlight Sims’s wide-ranging scholarly and aesthetic interests, as well as her prodigious energies.
Lowery Stokes Sims, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923–1992 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002)
Sims also organized and authored catalogues for exhibitions from the Metropolitan’s collection in coperation with the American Federation of Arts. In 2003, she was cocurator for Challenge of the Modern: African American Artists, 1925–1945 at the Studio Museum in Harlem, as well as Frederick J. Brown: Portraits in Jazz, Blues, and Other Icons, organized by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. This year Sims organized the inaugural exhibition, Curator’s Eye I, at the National Gallery of Art in Kingston, Jamaica.
Sims’s commitment to scholarship, teaching, and museum work has been demonstrated through her classes at Queens College, the School of Visual Arts, and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. She has also lectured at the Internship Program at the Studio Museum and at the Curatorial and Museum Training Internship courses at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Sims has been a visiting critic, lecturer, guest curator, and juror at many schools, museums, and institutions across the country.
Active in her community, Sims served on panels for the Department of Cultural Affairs of the City of New York, Metropolitan Transit Authority of New York City, Metropolitan Life Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, and National Endowment for the Humanities. In 1981, Sims was elected a member of the Commission on the Status of Women of the City of New York and, in 1987, was appointed for a five-year term to the New York State Council on the Arts. Sims served on CAA’s Board of Directors from 1993 to 1997, and was cochair of the studio-art program for the 1994 Annual Conference. She has also served on the board of ArtTable and the advisory committee of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School for Social Research; she is currently on the boards of the Caribbean Cultural Center, Art Matters, Tiffany Foundations, and the advisory committee of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. In 2003–4 she was a member of the jury to select the design for the memorial at the World Trade Center site.
Sims has served as an officer for the Metropolitan Museum’s Forum of Curators and Conservators and their Staff Institutional Responsibility Committee, established in 1993. In 1991, she received CAA’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism. Sims’s many outstanding achievements have culminated in the awarding of six honorary degrees: Maryland Institute College of Art, Moore College of Art and Design, Parsons School of Design at the New School University, Atlanta College of Art, the College of New Rochelle, and Brown University.
—Deborah Frizzell, William Paterson University of New Jersey
