Eleanor Antin in ARTNEWS, by Alex Greenberger

 

Each year, the College Art Association, an esteemed New York–based organization that promotes the study of art history, gives out awards to artists, curators, and scholars. Receiving one of the CAA’s mentions can be a major honor, and on Tuesday, the organization revealed who has received this year’s awards for distinction.

 

Artist Eleanor Antin, who is best known for her Conceptual works from the early 1970s, has won the CAA’s lifetime achievement award. Antin is widely acclaimed for her 1972 work CARVING: A Traditional Sculpture, for which the artist methodically photographed her nude body as she reduced her food intake and gradually lost 10 pounds over the course of 37 days. Antin, who is considered one of the most important feminist artists of all time, revisited that piece last year CARVING: 45 Years Later, in which she re-performed her 1972 work for a solo show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

 

Among the other celebrated figures who won awards was curator Denise Murell, who recently became the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first associate curator for 19th- and 20th-century art. Murrell received the CAA’s award for exhibitions at smaller institutions for her 2018 show “Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today,” which first opened at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery and was expanded into a Musée d’Orsay blockbuster in Paris last year. The show ranked on ARTnews’s list of the 25 most important exhibitions of the 2010s.

 

Art historian Darby English—who, with with Charlotte Barat, put out a survey of the Museum of Modern Art and black art over the years—won a criticism award for his book To Describe a Life: Notes from the Intersection of Art and Race Terror, which was published last year by Yale University Press, and Joseph Leo Koerner won the lifetime achievement award for writing about art. The Terra Foundation for American Art, an organization that regularly funds exhibitions of American art around the country, received an award for its philanthropy.

 

Read the full article here.