2023 Isler Prize
Image: Janet Echelman, As If It Were Already Here, Boston, Massachusetts, 2015. Hand-spliced Ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) and braided high-tenacity polyester fibers with colored LED lighting. Courtesy of the Studio Echelman. Photography: Melissa Henry
ARCHITECTURE
Janet Echelman
Isler Prize
Janet Echelman is the recipient of the Isler Prize of the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures (IASS), for her artworks which intersect sculpture, architecture, urban design, material science, computer science and engineering. Echelman’s art transforms with wind and light, and shifts from being an object you look at, into an experience you can get lost in. Using unlikely materials from atomized water particles to engineered fiber fifteen times stronger than steel, Echelman combines ancient craft with computational design software to create artworks, revealing the interconnectedness of networked systems—urban, environmental and human.
John Moores Painting Prize
Image: Graham Crowley, Light Industry, 2022. Oil on canvas, 152x178x4 cm.
ART
Graham Crowley
John Moores Painting Prize
Graham Crowley, an artist who has been exhibiting widely since the 1970s, has been announced as the winner of this year's distinguished John Moores Painting Prize, for his 2022 painting Light Industry, which reimagines a motorcycle dealership he visited in his home county of Suffolk. Light Industry continues his interest in luminosity. The work, part of a series he developed from memory, renders what could otherwise be seen as an ordinary workshop in an otherwordly green. In a statement the artist said: "What I found enthralling about the place was the light; a diffused, dusty kind of light that emanated from a grubby, obscured skylight."
About the John Moores Painting Prize
2023 ANTI Festival
International Prize for Live Art
Image: Festival Anti 2023, Kuopio, Finlande. Tiziano Cruz, Soliloquio, performance of the winner of the 10th ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art. © Photos Akseli Muraja/ANTI Festival 2023
ART
Tiziano Cruz
ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art
Tiziano Cruz was announced as the 2023 winner of ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art. Tiziano’s work accounts to the consequences of the colonial violence in Argentina and its consequences that currently affect indigenous, racialized and marginalised communities through different degrees of invisibilization, discrimination, epistemicides and deterritorializations. In Soliloquio, Tizianos’ powerful and poetic oration captures a personal statement to reflect on the local and regional relation and the cultural traditions of his ancestry. He creates a collective and communal work that is not constructed for consumption but for the empowerment and recognition of communities that have been historical disenfranchised.
About the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art
Heinz Awards
Image: Kevin Beasley, Site XXIX, 2023. Polyurethane resin, raw virginia cotton, housedresses, altered housedresses, confetti t-shirts, altered t-shirts, guineafowl feathers, fiberglass. 74.5x92.5x2'' / 189.23x234.95x5.08 cm
ART
Kevin Beasley
Roberto Lugo
Heinz Awards for the Arts
Kevin Beasley and Roberto Lugo are the recipients the Heinz Awards for the Arts. Beasley, based in New York City, is best known for his sculptures made of colourful, translucent resin poured over and around garments and clothing fragments. His work also spans installation, video, sound and performance. Roberto Lugo's ceramic sculptures use forms that were long dismissed as craft, ornate pots, vases and other vessels, to memorialise people from his own life and important historical and cultural figures, from murdered rappers to Civil Rights activist Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander. His current solo exhibition at R & Company in New York, The Gilded Ghetto, reinterprets the imagery of ancient Greco-Roman vases to chronicle the experiences of Afro-Latino communities.
Maestri d’Eccellenza Prize
Image: © Fabio Ottaviano
CRAFT
Fabio Ottaviano
Master Craftsman of Excellence
LVMH Métiers d’Excellence announced the winners of its first edition of the "Maestri d’Eccellenza Prize", organized in collaboration with Fendi, Confartigianato Imprese and the Italian National Chamber of Fashion. Fabio Ottaviano was named Master Craftsman of Excellence. Master of the ancient art of cameo engraving, Fabio Ottaviano stands out internationally for the quality and variety of materials used, such as shell, mother of pearl and semi-precious stones. The process in realizing his products is entirely handmade. His creations reveal the perfect fusion of tradition and modernity. His style is characterized by multiform veils and transparencies.
About the Maestri d’Eccellenza Prize
2023 Obel Award
Image: Courtesy of SCAPE
ARCHITECTURE
Living Breakwaters by
SCAPE and Kate Orff
Obel Award
Focused in its fifth edition on Adaptation, the Obel Award has been awarded to Living Breakwaters in New York, a green infrastructure project off the shore of Staten Island, designed by SCAPE, a landscape architecture and urban design practice, and its founder Kate Orff. Living Breakwaters is a half mile linear necklace of near-shore breakwaters. A mix of stones and carefully designed ecologically enhanced concrete units are placed strategically to calm the water, reduce erosion, and rebuild onshore beaches, but also to support oysters, fin fish, and other marine species. The oysters will form part of the design of the artificial reef formation. As they reproduce, the breakwaters grow denser and able to provide more protection of the shore.
