Awards
2006 Frank Jewett Mather Award
Gregg Bordowitz and Okwui Enwezor
Gregg Bordowitz
The Frank Jewett Mather Award goes to an author of art criticism that has appeared in whole or in part in North American publications. This year, the jury selected two winners, Gregg Bordowitz and Okwui Enwezor.
In the 1980s, the resistance to understanding the AIDS crisis encouraged the virulence of the epidemic. Today, willed ignorance in the face of what we’ve learned makes AIDS a leading cause of death among young North American men and a devastating force in large parts of the second and third worlds. These persistent conditions mean that artists and writers who were gay twenty years ago or are HIV-positive now have their themes more or less thrust upon them. In such times, those who cannot be represented must represent themselves.
Gregg Bordowitz was among those who embraced this imperative in the mid-1980s, inventing himself as passionate, articulate, witty, and intelligent. The essays in The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings, 1986–2003 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004) are an important aspect of his efforts to argue for the formation and maintenance of this collective consciousness and then to record it. Identifying a compelling topic is, though, only part of writing good criticism. How one writes matters as much as what one writes, and the matching of fluency to urgency is one of this book’s most noteworthy traits. With impressive articulacy, Bordowitz uses a range of voices—exposition, critique, reminiscence—to gather together crucial strands of contemporary cultural history from ACT-UP’s early days to the last decade’s ambivalent combination of medical breakthrough with ideological opposition to the current pandemics. The jury is pleased to present him with the Mather Award for a book that is as admirably thoughtful and charismatic as its author.
Okwui Enwezor
The Mather jury is also pleased to recognize the critical achievement of Okwui Enwezor. In a series of exhibitions and essays developed during the last decade, Enwezor has done much to transform the field of contemporary art and its reception beyond a Euro-American focus. It is no overstatement to say that Enwezor’s curatorial activity has changed the landscape of contemporary art. As the curator of such exhibitions as The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994; In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present; and Trade Routes: History and Geography (the second Johannesburg Biennale), Enwezor has brought unprecedented attention to African and African diasporic practice, and to such forms as contemporary African photography and the projected documentary. As the artistic director of Documenta XI, he developed an innovative concept of “platforms” located in five cities, transforming Documenta into a truly international show and intellectual forum.
Enwezor’s activity as a writer and editor has been inextricable from his curatorial efforts. Recognizing the importance of critical debate in shaping art’s reception, he has placed discourse at the forefront of his work. In such essays as “Between Two Worlds: Postmodernism and African Artists in the Western Metropolis” and “The Enigma of the Rainbow Nation: Contemporary South African Art at the Crossroads of History,” he has developed a clear analysis of contemporary African art and its reception in a predominantly Western art world. As a founding editor of Nka, the first journal dedicated to contemporary African art, and a coeditor of Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), he has nurtured the burgeoning field of contemporary African art criticism. We present the Mather Award to Enwezor in recognition of these varied and important efforts.
Jury: James Meyer, Emory University, chair; Charles Hagen, University of Connecticut; Catherine Lord, University of California, Irvine; and Charles Reeve, Ontario College of Art and Design.
