Awards
2010 Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
Holland Cotter
Holland Cotter (photograph by Bradley Marks)
The jury welcomes the opportunity to recognize Holland Cotter’s work for its breadth, depth, and sensitivity, and for the ways in which he has enabled a newspaper of international record—indeed the national newspaper of the United States—to attend to the fullest expanse of the arts. The jury is also pleased that this award serves to acknowledge and support the indispensability of print journalism to art criticism in all its forms.
As staff art critic at the New York Times for more than ten years, Cotter has been remarkable for his unwavering attention to the work of those less recognized, including women, artists of color, and artists from all five boroughs of New York, giving important visibility to work of all kinds. His subjects have ranged from Italian Renaissance painting to street-based communal work by artist collectives.
Writing widely about non-Western art and culture as well, he has introduced readers to a broad range of contemporary Chinese art and has helped bring contemporary art from India to wider critical notice. Cotter’s interest in Asian cultures was sparked and furthered by his studies of early Indian Buddhist art, which earned him an MPhil from Columbia University, where he also studied Sanskrit and taught Indian and Islamic art.
As winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism, Cotter was honored in the formal award citation for “his wide ranging reviews of art, from Manhattan to China, marked by acute observation, luminous writing and dramatic storytelling.”
Referring to his receipt of the Pulitzer, the first time in thirty-five years that its criticism award was given to a critic of the visual arts, Suzanne P. Blier, professor of fine art and African and African American art at Harvard University, noted that Cotter is “a man of extraordinary brilliance and compassion with an intellectual wingspan that covers the globe.” She went on to say that the prize rightfully honors Cotter’s contributions because “the arts he covers are worthy of and indeed demand the sort of intellectual rigor and provocative in-depth analysis that he brings to bear on them.”
Jury: Janet Kaplan, Moore College of Art and Design, chair; S. Hollis Clayson, Northwestern University; and Keith Moxey, Barnard College, Columbia University.
