Awards
Distinguished Feminist Award
The Distinguished Feminist Award, first presented in 2009, honors a person who, through his or her art, scholarship, or advocacy, has advanced the cause of equality for women in the arts. This award replaces the Annual Recognition Awards given by CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA) from 1996 to 2008 at a ceremony at the Annual Conference.
2013 Winners
Harmony Hammond (photograph by Judith Cooper)
CAA recognizes Harmony Hammond for her outstanding contributions to feminist and queer culture through art, writing, curating, teaching, and activism. Since the 1960s, she has created muscular, tactile paintings and sculptures that have redefined abstraction in contemporary art. Once at the forefront of the feminist reclamation of craft-based processes throughout the 1970s, Hammond has continued to innovate brilliantly with materials. Her most recent monochromes persistently grapple with the physical properties of paint and are intricately related to a feminist and queer politics of spectatorship. A founding member of A.I.R. Gallery and the Heresies Collective, Hammond has organized many exhibitions featuring women artists throughout her career. She has also been the leading light for promoting, documenting, and historicizing lesbian artists in the United States. Based in New Mexico, Hammond remains an active art critic and advocate for local art production and is a brilliant, generous teacher who energetically mentors students in their study of art making, art history, and aikido, a Japanese martial art.
Martha Rosler photographs the Convocation audience during her award acceptance speech (photograph by Bradley Marks)
For over forty years, Martha Rosler’s pioneering work as an artist, activist, and educator has consistently put her at the leading edge of contemporary art. Since her groundbreaking Body Beautiful and Bringing the War Home collages of the late 1960s, she has been acknowledged as an incisive analyst of the myths and realities of contemporary culture and is recognized among the most influential artists of her generation. Rosler’s prolific, boundary-shattering practice—including work in video, photo-text, performance, and installation—has taken on public space, systems of transportation, issues of war, surveillance, and information, and women’s voices and experience regarding all of the above. She has also covered these subjects with her students at Rutgers University, where she taught for thirty years, in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and most recently at the dozens of international lectures and workshops that have increasingly intersected with her often-collaborative studio practice. Rosler’s critical writing is also recognized for the same, lucid perspectives on the ongoing, ever-evolving connections among consumerism, technology, politics, sexism, class divisions, and violence that are reflected in her artwork.
Past Winners
Read a list of all winners of the Distinguished Feminist Award. Recipients of the CWA Annual Recognition Awards have included Agnes Gund, Louise Bourgeouis, Linda Nochlin, Nancy Spero, Betye Saar, and Moira Roth, among others.
Award Nominations
CAA has begun accepting nominations for the 2014 Distinguished Feminist Award.
