2010 Ordway Prize Winners Announced

Hamza Walker and Artur Zmijewski Receive Honors from Creative Link for the Arts

New York, NY. Creative Link for the Arts and the New Museum have announced Hamza Walker, the Director of Education and Associate Curator at Chicago's Renaissance Society, and Polish artist Artur Zmijewski, as the recipients of the Ordway Prize. An international panel of Nominators and a Jury of leading art world figures – led by Jennifer McSweeney, Director of Creative Link for the Arts, and Richard Flood, Chief Curator at the New Museum — selected the Ordway Prize recipients from a global pool of nominees. Walker and Zmijewski will each receive an unrestricted cash prize of $100,000.

"Working with artists is a reward in itself, and I feel privileged at being so generously honored for my passion. I wish I had a grand vision for the award, but as it stands, the bricks and mortar of my life are "said Hamza Walker.

"I was happy to be nominated for the Ordway Prize, but winning was quite unexpected. My art is important to me, and now it has been recognized by others in a significant way and that pleases me immensely. The considerable amount of money that comes with this award will surely help to realize my future projects," said Artur Zmijewski.

Ordway Prize Winner: Curator/Art Writer

Hamza Walker

Ordway Prize Winner: Artist

Artur Zmijewski

The Ordway Prize is named for the naturalist, philanthropist, and art patron Katherine Ordway. The prize acknowledges the contributions of a Curator/Arts Writer and an Artist whose work has had significant impact on the field of contemporary art, but who has yet to receive broad public recognition. Nominees for the Ordway Prize are midcareer talents between the ages of forty and sixty-five, with a developed body of work of a minimum of fifteen years.

Jennifer McSweeney, Director of Creative Link for the Arts, noted that "the award honors past achievements, but it is equally dedicated to future promise. Hamza Walker's and Artur Zmijewski's work investigates and reveals the possibilities of humanity and is dedicated to celebrating life with all its limitations and aspirations. Both use their immeasurable talents to expose the frailties and conundrums that challenge mankind's psyche, all the while giving hope to the viewer via the enlightenment offered by their difficult and honest questions."

Richard Flood, Chief Curator at the New Museum said, "It's very easy to fall in love with the young and reward them for being young. It's a different thing to reward contributors like Hamza and Artur who have quietly and steadfastly dedicated their lives to the continuity of creativity. The Ordway Prize is a way of saying thank you for holding down the fort and moving the conversation forward; thank you for changing the way we understand the world."

The Ordway Prize is the only unrestricted international award of this caliber that recognizes a Curator/Arts Writer and it is also one of the most generous awards given to a contemporary Artist. Past Ordway Prize recipients have included: Curator/Arts Writer Ralph Rugoff and Artist Doris Salcedo (2006); and Curator/Arts Writer James Elaine and Artist Cildo Meireles (2008).

Finalists for $100,000 Ordway Prize Announced
by Creative Link for the Arts and New Museum

New York, NY...Creative Link for the Arts and the New Museum today announce the six finalists for the Ordway Prize, which is given to a Curator/Arts Writer and an Artist.

The two winners will each receive an unrestricted cash prize of $100,000. Now in its third cycle, the Ordway Prize is the only unrestricted international award of this caliber that recognizes a Curator/Arts Writer and is also one of the most generous awards given to a contemporary Artist.

Candidates for the Ordway Prize are identified through an anonymous nomination process of submissions drawn from a global pool of curators, writers, artists, and museum directors, led by Jennifer McSweeney, Director of Creative Link for the Arts, and Richard Flood, Chief Curator at the New Museum. A jury composed of leading arts professionals will select the two Ordway Prize recipients. The Ordway Prize winners will be announced in early 2010.

Curator/Arts Writer Finalists:
Sabine Breitwieser (b. 1962, Austria)	Hou Hanru (b.1963, China)	Hamza Walker (b. 1966, United States)
Artist Finalists:
Tania Bruguera (b.1968, Cuba)	William Pope.L (b.1955, United States)	Artur Zmijewski (b. 1966, Poland)

The Ordway Prize was created in 2005, and was named for the naturalist, philanthropist, and arts patron Katherine Ordway. The prize acknowledges the contributions of a Curator/Arts Writer and an Artist whose work has had significant impact on the field of contemporary art, but who has yet to receive broad public recognition. Finalists for the Ordway Prize are midcareer talents between the ages of forty and sixty-five, with a developed body of work extending over a minimum of fifteen years.

Past Ordway Prize recipients have included: Curator/Arts Writer Ralph Rugoff and Artist Doris Salcedo (2006); and Curator/Arts Writer James Elaine and Artist Cildo Meireles (2008).

"I am inspired by the short list of Curator/Arts Writers and Artists as they represent such a rich cross section of talents working today. This year more than ever, I find it incredibly valuable to provide this type of support," said Jennifer McSweeney, Director of Creative Link for the Arts.

"The Ordway Prize is singular in shining a light on substantial yet under recognized creativity and contributions to the field. We are delighted to participate in and host this prestigious award," said Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis Director, New Museum.

ABOUT THE CURATOR/ARTS WRITER FINALISTS

Sabine Breitwieser was born in 1962 in Wels, Austria, and currently lives and works in Vienna. She is the Secretary and Treasurer of CIMAM–The International Committee of ICOM (International Council of Museums) for Museums and Collections of Modern Art. In 2009, her large, thematic exhibition "Modernologies" opened at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). The first part of her two-stage exhibition "Utopia and Monument" for the public space in Graz was launched at the festival Steirischer Herbst in Austria in 2009. In 2009, she organized "Which Life?" at the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna. From 1988–2007, Breitwieser was the Founding Director and Curator of the Generali Foundation in Vienna, where she built a widely acclaimed contemporary art collection of more than 2,000 works, and in 1995 opened a new building by architects Jabornegg/Palffy. From 2003–04 she was Co-Curator and Researcher of the "International 04" Liverpool Biennial. She has curated exhibitions and written publications on artists such as Isa Genzken, Hans Haacke, Edward Krasinski, Gordon Matta-Clark, Gustav Metzger, Adrian Piper, Martha Rosler, and Allan Sekula. Some of her publications include: Designs for the Real World, double life, REPLAY, vivencias/life experience, and White Cube/Black Box.

Hou Hanru was born in Canton (Guangzhou), China in 1963. He currently lives and works in San Francisco and Paris. He is Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs and Chair of Exhibitions and Museum Studies program at the San Francisco Art Institute. Hou received both his undergraduate and graduate degrees in art history from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing, with additional studies there in painting, performance, installation, and architectural research. He has been a consultant for several cultural institutions internationally including the Asian Art Council, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Global Advisory Committee of the Walker Art Center, and the Contemporary Art Museum in Kumamoto, Japan. Hou is a regular contributor to several journals on contemporary art including Flash Art and Art Asia Pacific, among others. In 2009, Hou organized the Lyon Biennial: "The Spectacle of the Everyday." In 2008, Hou curated "Too Early for Vacation" for ev+a in Ireland. In 2007, Hou was curator of the 10th International Istanbul Biennial, and the Chinese Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale. Other recent projects include the Guangzhou Triennial "Beyond: An Extraordinary Space of Experimentation for Modernization" in 2004–06; and the 3rd Tirana Biennale "Go Inside," in Albania in 2005.

Hamza Walker was born in 1966 in New York, and currently lives in Chicago, where he is the Director of Education and Associate Curator for the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. He is also on the faculty of The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. He has written for Trans, New Art Examiner, Parkett, and Artforum, and catalogue essays on Darren Almond, Rebecca Morris, Giovanni Anselmo, Thomas Hirschhorn, Moshekwa Langa, and Katharina Grosse. Curatorial projects at the Renaissance Society include "Several Silences" (2009); "Black Is, Black Ain't" (2008); and "Katerina Seda"; "Meanwhile, in Baghdad" (2007); "All the Pretty Corpses" (2005); "A Perfect Union...More or Less (2004)"; and "New Video, New Europe," (2004), among other projects. Walker currently is on the boards of Noon, a literary annual publishing short fiction, Lampo, a new and experimental-music presenter; and The Chicago Public Art Group. Prior to his work at the Renaissance society, Walker was the Public Art Coordinator for the City of Chicago, Department of Cultural Affairs. He has served on numerous panels locally and internationally, and is the recipient of the 1999 Norton Curatorial Grant and the 2005 Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement.

ABOUT THE ARTIST FINALISTS

Tania Bruguera was born in 1968 in Havana, Cuba, and currently lives and works in Havana and Chicago. She is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in behavior art, performance, and installation. She is the founder/director of Arte de Conducta, the first performance studies and political art program in Latin America, hosted by Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago. Bruguera participated in Documenta 11 in 2002, as well as in the 49th, 51st,and 53rd Venice Biennales in 2001, 2005, and 2009. Her work has also been exhibited at the New Museum, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Germany; Tate Modern and Tate Britain, England; Pompidou, France; and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Cuba. In 1998, she was a Guggenheim Fellow; in 2002, she was an Artist in Residency at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; and in 2008 she received the Prince Claus Award in the Netherlands. She received her masters in fine arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Instituto Superior de Arte in Cuba. A survey show about her work will open in January 2010 at the Neuberger Museum in New York.

William Pope.L was born in 1955 in Newark, New Jersey, and currently lives and works in Maine, where he lectures at Bates College. He is a prominent multidisciplinary artist known for his conceptual, often performance-based art, including a set of "crawls" on his belly, military-style through city streets. In 2009, he was commissioned to create a reinvention of Allan Kaprow's environment Yard for Hauser and Wirth Gallery in New York. His solo exhibitions include "Corbu Pops" at the Carpenter Center, Harvard University in 2009, and "Drawing, Dreaming and Drowning," at The Art Institute of Chicago in 2008. In 2002 and 2003, a retrospective of his work "eRacism" toured the United States. Pope.L has also participated in group shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and has presented performances and crawls across the United States, including one at the 2002 Whitney Biennial. Pope.L has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Visual Arts. He studied at the Pratt Institute before receiving his bachelors at Montclair State College and a masters in fine art at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Artur Zmijewski was born in 1966 in Warsaw, Poland, where he currently lives and works. He uses film, video, and photography to present staged "social experiments" he has devised—ranging in theme from the politicized to the psychosocial. In 2007–08 he was a DAAD Artists in Residence in Berlin, Germany. On October 28, 2009, Zmijewski will present a recent selection of work for the Museum of Modern Art's "Project 91" series. In November 2009, the Cornerhouse will present the artist's first major UK survey. In 2008, Zmijewski showed Oko za Oko (An Eye for an Eye) in the New Museum's "After Nature" exhibition. Zmijewski's film Them was shown at Documenta 12 in 2007, and Singing Lesson 1 Manifesta 4 in 2002. In 2005, his film Repetition was shown in the Polish Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennial. For the exhibition "Guarene Arte 2000," he was given the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Per L'Arte prize for the work Oko za Oko (An Eye for an Eye). He studied at the Faculty of Sculpture of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw from 1990–95, and received his diploma from the studio of Professor Grzegorz Kowalski in 1995. Zmijewski was an editor of Czereja magazine.

ABOUT CREATIVE LINK FOR THE ARTS

Creative Link for the Arts is a privately funded nonprofit organization dedicated to facilitating partnership in philanthropy and forging innovative relationships between art institutions, nonprofits, corporations, and philanthropists interested in supporting the arts and creating a cultural legacy.

ABOUT THE NEW MUSEUM

Founded in 1977, the New Museum is a leading destination for new art and new ideas. It is Manhattan's only dedicated contemporary art museum and is respected internationally for the adventurousness and global scope of its curatorial program. For more information, visit newmuseum.org.

Ordway Press Release Finalists, November 11, 2009

MAKING THE ART WORLD A BETTER, AND BETTER-DRESSED, PLACE (Vanity Fair Blog - 4.14.2010)

For the past decade, the New York art world has been greatly enriched by two visionary women, Yvonne Force Villareal and Doreen Remen, who, with director Casey Fremont, comprise the Art Production Fund. Founded by Force Villareal and Remen, both fashion plates in their own right, the not-for-profit has struck the hard-to-find balance between the art and fashion worlds and done it with smarts and sexiness, something that can be woefully lacking in the art world.

New Yorkers became intimately acquainted with A.P.F.'s activities this winter with "Art Adds," a series of works by artists Alex Katz, Yoko Ono, and Shirin Neshat that appeared on the ad spaces of 500 taxi tops. It amounted to a 24/7 art campaing, with an estimated five million "viewers" - an audience that few, if any, art projects can claim. For the past five years, A.P.F. has had a sell-out run of its artist-commissioned beach towels, from the "Works on Whatever" collection; you can wrap yourself in terry-cloth pieces by Cindy Sherman, Jukian Schnabel, Marilyn Minter, and Rob Pruit, among many others.

If, in the past five years, you happen to have made the art pilgrimage to Marfa, Texas, to the holy grail of Donald Judd's Chinati Foundation, you have seen Prada Marfa, a facade of a prada store with stocked windows, only you can't enter and can't buy anything. It's the one and only surrealist designer pop-up shop that's a permanent installation, a project A.P.F. produced, with artists Elmgreen and Dragset, literally in the middle of nowhere. In 1998, A.P.F. put itself and Vanessa Beecroft on the international stage with Beecroft's Show at the Guggenheim, where Gucci-era Tom Ford helped cover an army of girls with sparking bras and panties while they stood and slouched and laid on the floor of the museum's rotunda.

A.P.F. has sponsored more masculine pursuits, such as, in 2007, Aaron Young's Greeting Card at the Park Avenue armory, where another army, this time of stunt motorcycle riders, created a massive painting by making "burn-outs" on 9,216 square feet of plywood panels sealed with underpainting.

On Monday night, at the world-famous Boom Boom Room at the top of the New York Standard Hotel, A.P.F. performance unto itself. the circus-like gala was M.C.'d by rap legend Fab 5 Freddy and included performances by Kembra Pfahler and by Terence Koh, who painted his hand gold. Linda Yablonsky, the sage recorder of the art world, had a both called "Personal Genius". Sadly, I never did find my way back to Linda for her estimable wisdom, what with all the free-flowing Dom Perignon (I was "working" - I have a challenging job).

The apexes of the art and fashion worlds were there in full force, and, in a rare moment, became a single, blurred entity to celebrate the fabulous ladies of Art Production Fund, as well as the guests of honor, Warhol icon "Baby Jane" Hozler and art philanthropist Jennifer McSweeney. Here's to another decade of Yvonne, Doreen, and Casey's making the art world a better place. And, certainly, a better-dressed place...

  Vanity Fair Blog, April 14,2010

AR PRODUCTION FUND CELEBRATES ITS FIRST DECADE (WWD-Online - 4.13.2010)

Jonelle Monae performing (Photo by Lauren Fleishman)

Donna Karan and Amy Sacco

The 18th Floor of the Standard sees its fair share of wild antics. Monday night, the revelry got off to a before-dark start when Yvonne Force Villareal and Doreen Remen took over the vertiginous space to celebrate the 10th anniversary of their Art Production Fund, a non-profit organization that helps conteporary artists mount challenging projects.

And it seemed some attendees at this early bird special (the festivities kicked off at 7pm), were making the first trip up to the windowed lounge. "Is this like Dante's Inferno?" asked one guest as she eyed Marco Brambilla's "Civilization" video in the Standard's elevator. "Which circle are we going to?" shot back her friend.

Upstairs at the party, dubbed a Birthday Benefit, Marilyn Minter, Rachel Feinstein, Diana Picasso, Donna Karan, Thelma Golden, Beth Rubin DeWooody, Anna Sui and Olya Thompson enjoyed a range of activities including a temporary tattoo station with designs by Kiki Smith; a candle-lit sofa area for portraits by Jesica Craig-Martin and "personal genius" session with Linda Yablonsky.

"We wanted to do it at a venue that we felt really warm in and it's the most beaytiful, glamorous spot in New York," said Villareal, who has known Remen since they were 18 and at RISD. "We never dreamed of something so truitful and we just want to keep it going and going."

The evening also honored Jane Holzer and Jennifer McSweeney, the latter of whom was looking forward to some time at the tattoo booth. "I've always secretly wanted one on my ankie so maybe it's the time now," she said. "I have Kiki above my bed, I have never her fairies above my bed, so I might as well have her on my body, too."

As Amy Sacco and Samantha and Amy Rosen snacked on burgers and spring rolls in ribbons. Terence Koh meandered around seemingly as part of a performance piece, that had him dressed all in while with his right hand covered in gold paint. The explanation?

"I don't know, I'm kind of lazy," said Koh. It was certainly a deterrent to any gratuitours hand-shaking. "I don't really want people touching it," he said.

KIoh wasn't the only one delving in body paint. Later in the evening artist Kembra Pfahlar took to a stage naked save for knee-high faced up boots, a hedge-sized black wig and top-to-toe red body paint, along with two backup singers. She was followed by Janelle Monac, whose hit song "Tightrope" had Remen standing on the bar to get a better view.

  WWD-Online, April 13, 2010

OVERHEARD (Vogue - 4.10.2010)

This month, Art Production Fund celebrates its tenth anniversary with its first benefit at the Top of the Standard. Fab 5 Freddy (at work on a series of special art canvases of classic boxing scenes) will emcee the event which will honor both Jane Hozler and Jennifer McSweeney and will feature Kembra Pfahker's "Happy Birthday" rendition, with a special performance from Terence Koh.

  VOGUE, April, 2010