Awards
Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
The Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement, first presented in 1988, celebrates the career of an artist who, among other distinctions, has demonstrated particular commitment to his or her work throughout a long career and has had an important impact nationally and internationally on the field.
2013 Winner
Ellsworth Kelly in his Spencertown studio in 2006 (photograph by Jack Shear)
For over seventy years, Ellsworth Kelly has forged an independent and influential career as a draftsman, painter, sculptor, photographer, and printmaker. His first solo exhibition was held at Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in 1956. Since then his work has been exhibited extensively across the world in countless solo and group exhibitions. For the artist and committee member Roy Dowell, Kelly’s “deceptively simple paintings and drawings have been a symbol of that elusive and inexplicable quality of rightness and accuracy of vision that I value in art. The sustained intelligence and rigor of his practice is most admirable as he offers to his audience an example of unwavering conviction and elegance.”
Past Winners
One of CAA’s most illustrious prizes, the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement has recognized the long, prominent, and influential careers of many contemporary artists, among them Joan Mitchell and Louise Bourgeois in the 1980s; Willem de Kooning, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and John Baldessari in the 1990s; and Alison Knowles, Elizabeth Murray, and Chris Burden in the present decade.
Read a list of all winners of the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement from 1988 to the present.
Award Nominations
CAA has begun accepting nominations for the 2014 Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement.
