Mark Dion wins Lucelia award

The Smithsonian American Art Museum announced today that Mark Dion is the 2008 winner of the museum's Lucelia Artist Award. He was selected by an independent panel of jurors for "his prolific creativity and impressively varied body of work, which includes mixed-media installations, sculptures and public projects that explore the relationship among art, science and history through pseudoscientific methods of investigation and display."

Dion is the eighth annual winner of the $25,000 award, which is intended to encourage the artist's future development and experimentation. The Lucelia Artist Award is part of the museum's ongoing commitment to contemporary art and artists through annual exhibitions, acquisitions and public programs.

The five jurors who selected the winner are Mark Bessire, director of the Bates College Museum of Art; Allan McCollum, artist and senior critic in sculpture at the Yale University School of Art; Nancy Princenthal, senior editor at Art in America magazine; John Ravenal, the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; and Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, director and chief curator at the Aspen Art Museum.

Congrats to Dion!