2005 Lucelia Award Announced

A few days ago the Smithsonian sent a news release to everyone announcing the winner of the Lucelia Award:

The Smithsonian American Art Museum announced today that Andrea Zittel is the fifth annual winner of its Lucelia Artist Award, established by the museum in 2001 to encourage leading contemporary American artists. This award is part of the museum's commitment to contemporary art and artists through awards and acquisitions.

An independent panel of jurors chose Zittel for the award in recognition of her ability to "create objects and total settings that reconsider the relationships between art and life. A utopian yet rigorously formal sensibility dominates."

"The timing of the Smithsonian American Art Museum couldn't have been better," said Zittel. "I have been working on a number of new ideas recently and the Lucelia Artist Award will really help me continue with the projects."

"Andrea Zittel has shown a sustained commitment to distinctive work that challenges conventional thinking and expectations about the nature of art, which is exactly what the Lucelia Artist Award is intended to celebrate and support," said Elizabeth Broun, the museum's Margaret and Terry Stent Director.

The jurors continue in their statement, "Zittel's art is shaped by a serial-based comprehensiveness in which discrete works are part of ongoing experiments and the continuous development of ideas. An investigatory attitude prevails. Her practice embraces the recycling of materials and large-scale, public-art projects as much as the creation of custom-made objects and an extreme attention to personal, particularizing details. She has become a leading figure in the international art world and a strong influence on generations of artists worldwide."

Locally, the three jurors are now in the second phase of downselecting from the first set of semi-semifinalists for the $14,000 Trawick Prize.

Ms. Trawick has also added another $10,000 for the Bethesda Painting Awards, also being selected now.

Today Bake Gopnik in the WaPo has a nice story about the award. It would be nice if Gopnik also did a piece on whoever gets selected as the Trawick Prize winner; this would give Gopnik a chance to actually focus some of his printspace on an area art event of some significance.