La Biennale di Venezia
2022 Awards
Image: Pavilion of Great Britain. Sonia Boyce, Feeling Her Way, 2022.
Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
ART
Sonia Boyce
Golden Lion for Best National Participation
Great Britain has received the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at the 59th Venice Biennale. Created by Sonia Boyce, the pavilion, Feeling Her Way, features a sound installation of five Black British female musicians singing a cappella. Sonia Boyce is the first Black woman to represent Britain at the Venice event. "In working collaboratively with other black women, [Boyce] unpacks a plenitude of silenced stories," said the jury in a statement. They praised Boyce for her use of "a very contemporary language" that allowed the audience to piece together fragments, and for raising "important questions of rehearsal as opposed to the perfect attuned."
Image: Simone Leigh, Brick House, 2019, 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia,
The Milk of Dreams. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia. © Photography: Roberto Marossi
ART
Simone Leigh
Golden Lion for the Best Participant in the International Exhibition The Milk of Dreams
The Golden Lion for best contribution to the Biennale's international exhibition, The Milk of Dreams, went to American artist Simone Leigh for her "powerfully persuasive monumental sculptural opening to the Arsenale," one of the two main exhibition sites. The artist presented her work, Brick House, a 16-foot-tall bronze of a Black woman with cornrows and a dome-shaped torso that combines the forms of a skirt and a clay house. It was first seen on the High Line in New York in 2019. Simone Leigh is also representing the United States at this year’s event.
Image: Pavilion of France. Zineb Sedira, Les rêves n’ont pas de titre / Dreams have no titles, 2022.
© Thierry Bal and Zineb Sedira.
ART
Zineb Sedira
Special Mention for National Participation
A Special Mention for National Participation went to France, represented by Zineb Sedira, an artist of Algerian descent, for "the idea of building communities in the diaspora" and reviewing the "complex history of cinema beyond the West". Zineb Sedira’s film installation investigates the drive to make militant films in the 1960s and ’70s, a testament to the cultural partnerships forged in the past between the two sides of the Mediterranean. Zineb Sedira has transformed the French Pavilion into a film studio, blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality, between personal and collective memory.
About La Biennale di Venezia Awards
Mies van der Rohe Awards 2022
Image: Town House – Kingston University, London, United Kingdom, 2020,
designed by Grafton Architects. © Ed Reeve
ARCHITECTURE
Town House – Kingston University
by Grafton Architects
Architecture Prize
Grafton Architects, Dublin, is the recipient of the Architecture Prize for the Town House – Kingston University, London, rewarded for its remarkable environmental quality. The building creates an emotional experience from within and through the multi-level façade colonnade that creates a domestic atmosphere on different levels. It accommodates dance, library and study spaces using layers of silence and layers of sound which work perfectly well together. This is the first time that a university building has won the architecture prize.
Image: La Borda Cooperative Housing, Barcelona, Spain, 2018, designed by Lacol.
© Lluc Miralles, Antonio Navarro Wijkmark
ARCHITECTURE
La Borda Cooperative Housing
by Lacol
Emerging Architecture Prize
Lacol is the recipient of the Emerging Architecture Prize for the La Borda Cooperative Housing in Barcelona. This cooperative project is transgressive in its context because the model is based on co-ownership and co-management of shared resources and capacities. Lacol is also managed as a cooperative. Founded in 2009 in Barcelona, its architects work to build community infrastructures for the sustainability of life, as a key tool for eco-social transition, through architecture, cooperativism and participation.
About the Mies van der Rohe Awards
American Academy of Arts and Letters
2022 Awards
Image: Suzanne Jackson, falling, flying, fleeing, earth sault, 2020.
Acrylic, graphite, Stonehenge paper, wood, PVC pipe and D-rings. Dimensions variable.
As installed: 82 x 63 x 4 inches (208.3 x 160 x 10.2 cm).
ART
Suzanne Jackson
Jacob Lawrence Award in Art
The American Academy of Arts and Letters announced the winners of its 2022 art awards. The artist Suzanne Jackson was awarded the Jacob Lawrence Award in Art. Suzanne Jackson was born in St. Louis in 1944. In the past three years, after her son died following two heart attacks, she has recommitted herself to abstraction. In falling, flying, fleeing, earth sault, she applies layers of paint onto a sheet of plastic and then allows them to dry for extended periods of time. Once dry, she returns to them and continues adding more paint in places where she feels the composition could be more opaque or where the work’s physical structure needs to be strengthened.
Image: MPavilion, Melbourne's Queen Victoria Gardens, Australia, 2018,
designed by Estudio Carme Pinós. © John Gollings
ARCHITECTURE
Carme Pinós
Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize
The American Academy of Arts and Letters announced the recipients of its 2022 architecture awards. Spanish architect, Carme Pinós, was awarded the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize. She founded her own studio in 1991 after winning international recognition for her work with Enric Miralles. Since then, she has worked on projects ranging from urban refurbishments and public works to furniture design, while devoting time to teaching. The Centre Pompidou acquired the scale models of the CaixaForum Zaragoza in Spain, the Hotel Pizota in Mexico and the Maison de l’Algérie in Paris. The model of the Cube I Tower currently belongs to the collection of New York’s MoMA.
About the American Academy of Arts and Letters Awards
Rome Prize and Italian Fellowships 2022–23
Image: Tony Cokes, Installation view, Tony Cokes: This sin't heory. This is history.,
MACRO Contemporary Art Museum, Rome, 2021.
VISUAL ARTS
Rome Prize in Visual Arts
The American Academy in Rome announced the winners of 2022–23 Rome Prize and Italian Fellowships. The visual artists awarded this year are Tony Cokes, Todd Gray, Ester Partegàs, Elle Pérez, Ioana M. Uricaru and Bradford M. Young. Tony Cokes' text-driven video works have been exhibited at institutions such as the Shed and the MoMA and he is currently included in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. Partegàs primarily works in sculpture, Pérez is a photographer whose star has been on the rise the last several years, and Gray is known for his works that combine photography and sculpture. Uricaru and Young are both filmmakers.
Image: Hide & Seek, Long Island City, New York, 2018, designed by Dream the Combine.
Glass mirror, steel, graphite, shade fabric, netting, mist, lights, 18,000 sf.
Commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 for the 2018 Young Architects Program.
Images courtesy MoMA PS1 & The Museum of Modern Art.
ARCHITECTURE
Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample
Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers
Rome Prize in Architecture
Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample founded MOS, a New York–based architecture studio, in 2005. The studio has built projects internationally, with a focus on educational facilities, the arts, campus planning, housing and private houses. Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers are architects, artists, and cofounders of Dream the Combine. Their site-specific installations are perceptual frameworks for vision and movement that aim to complicate the relationship between body, space, and image. They create social infrastructures, often out of materials linked to industrial processes, as platforms for visceral experiences that bring people together.
About the Rome Prize and Italian Fellowships
International Woolmark Prize 2022
Image: Saul Nash, Fall 2022, featuring a winning merino look.
FASHION
Saul Nash
International Woolmark Prize
Saul Nash was announced the winner of the 2022 International Woolmark Prize. The British Guyanan designer was praised for his modern use of Merino wool, bridging a gap between active solutions and more formal requirements. With a focus on minimising waste, and emphasising movement and performance, Saul Nash’s modern interpretation of knitwear challenges preconceived ideas surrounding sportswear. MMUSOMAXWELL designers Maxwell Boko and Mmuso Potsane are also celebrated after receiving the Karl Lagerfeld Prize for Innovation.
