Awards
2011 Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
Lynda Benglis
Lynda Benglis, SELF PORTRAIT 1976, from the portfolio SELF, 2010, portfolio of 9 pigment prints, 34 x 23 in. each (artwork © Lynda Benglis; photograph provided by Cheim and Read, New York)
For more than forty years, Lynda Benglis has challenged prevailing views about the nature and function of art, producing sculpture, painting, video, photography, and installation art that demonstrate extraordinary breadth and invention. She models the life of an artist lived according to the rhythm of her own creativity and curiosity, rather than to the beat of fashion or the market and its enormous but inconstant rewards. Benglis’s career inspires younger artists, not because she was a star as a young artist, or because others have now begun to recognize her as a major artist at a later date. Her work has been and continues to be an ever-shifting monument to the body in motion, as she herself continues to change and grow as an artist.
Embodying the spirit of experimentation in contemporary sculpture and painting, Benglis has been a monumental force in changing how sculpture is made, presented, and viewed over the past forty years. The Sculpture Center in New York celebrated her exceptional achievements at their 2010 gala. Additionally, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin has organized Lynda Benglis, a retrospective of her work, that traveled to the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands; Le Consortium in Dijon, France; the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.
Jury: Stephanie Barron, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, chair; Ian Berry, Skidmore College; and Hannah Higgins, University of Illinois, Chicago.
