2011 Lifetime Achievement Awards
WOMEN’S CAUCUS FOR
ART ANNOUNCES
the 2011 Lifetime Achievement Awards
Women’s Caucus for Art is delighted to announce that
the 2011 recipients for the Lifetime Achievement Award are: Beverly
Buchanan, Diane Burko, Ofelia Garcia, Joan Marter, Carolee Schneemann,
and Sylvia
Sleigh. Biographical information
on these awardees is below.
The Lifetime Achievement Awards were first awarded in 1979 in President
Jimmy Carter’s Oval Office to Isabel Bishop, Selma Burke, Alice Neel, Louise
Nevelson, and Georgia O'Keeffe. Past honorees have represented the
full range of distinguished achievement in the visual arts professions. This
year’s awardees are no exception, with considerable accomplishment,
achievement, and contributions to the visual arts represented by their professional
efforts.
This year’s Lifetime Achievement Awards will be held in New
York City on Saturday evening, February 12, 2011, in conjunction with the
Women’s Caucus for Art and College Art Association’s 2011 Annual
Conferences.
Further details will be forthcoming. Download the PRESS RELEASE
Beverly Buchanan
Born in 1940, Beverly Buchanan made art from an early age. She received a
bachelor's degree in medical technology from Bennett College in Greensboro,
North Carolina and an M.S. in Parasitology, and a Masters of Public Health
both from Columbia University. Rather than pursuing a degree in medicine,
she decided to focus on making art. She studied at the Art Students League,
before moving to Georgia where she still lives (she divides her time between
Georgia and Michigan). Her early sculptures were poured concrete and stone. She
works in a variety of media, focusing on southern vernacular architecture.
She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Award,
and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. She was a Georgia
Visual Arts honoree, was a recipient of an Anonymous Was a Woman Award,
and was honored by the College Art Association Committee for Women in the
Arts.
Diane Burko
Diane Burko has been involved in the feminist movement since the early 1970s.
She is one of the founding members of the Women's Caucus for Art. She founded
and organized the first multi-venue feminist citywide art festival in Philadelphia: Philadelphia
Focuses on Women in the Visual Arts, Past and Present. After Focus, Diane
continued her feminist commitment to the present day, serving on the Women’s
Caucus for Art and College Art Association boards, the Philadelphia Art
Commission, and other community engagement. She is now the
Chair of the College Art Association’s Committee on Women in the
Arts. She has been recognized with Bellagio, Giverny, and National
Endowment for the Arts Fellowships along with many other honors. One of
the first movers and shakers in the feminist art movement, she has not
yet been recognized for her contributions. She resides in Philadelphia
and Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
Ofelia Garcia
Ofelia Garcia is Professor of Art at William Paterson University, where she
was dean of the Arts and Communication for a decade. B.A. Manhattanville
College, M.F.A. Tufts University, and a Kent Fellow at Duke University,
she has been art faculty at Boston College, critic at the Pennsylvania
Academy, director of The Print Center in Philadelphia, president of the
Atlanta College of Art and of Rosemont College. She was president
of WCA, served on the boards of CAA, the American Council on Education,
Haverford College, and others; most recently as board chair, Jersey City
Museum. She now serves as Vice Chair of the NJ State Council on the
Arts, on the Hudson County Art Commission, the boards of the Brodsky Center
for Innovative Editions, and of Catholics for Choice.
Joan Marter
Joan Marter is Distinguished Professor of Art History at Rutgers University.
She received her Ph.D. from University of Delaware. Marter has lectured
and published widely. She is currently Editor-in-Chief of The Grove Encyclopedia
of American Art. This five-volume reference will be published by Oxford
University Press in 2010. Marter serves as Editor of Woman's Art Journal,
which has been published continuously for 31 years. She has published monographs
on artists such as Alexander Calder, as well as writing extensively about
Abstract Expressionism and women artists. In 2004, she was inducted in
the Alumni Wall of Fame at the University of Delaware. She is President
of the Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Carolee Schneemann
Carolee Schneemann is a multidisciplinary artist whose radical works in performance
art, installation, film, and video are widely influential. The history
of her imagery is characterized by research into archaic visual traditions,
pleasure wrested from suppressive taboos, the body of the artist in dynamic
relationship with the social body. Her involvement in collaborative groups
includes Judson Dance Theater, Experiments in Art & Technology, and
many feminist organizations. She has exhibited at the Los Angeles Museum
of Contemporary Art; in NYC at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the
Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, as well as the Reina Sofia in
Madrid, Moderna Museet Stockholm, the Centre Pompidou Paris. The
recent multi-channel video installation Precarious was presented
at the Tate Liverpool September 2009. The Dorsky Museum at SUNY New
Paltz presented a major retrospective in 2010.
Sylvia Sleigh
Born in 1916 in Wales, Sylvia Sleigh paints portraits in a realist style,
informed by sources that include the Pre-Raphaelites to famous portraits
throughout history. She had her first solo exhibition in 1953 at the Kensington
Art Gallery. She married Lawrence Alloway, art critic, with whom she became
part of the London avant-garde. They moved to the United States, where
she continued painting and showing her work. In 1970, she became actively
involved in feminism and started painting life-size nudes in her precise,
realist style. She was active in many of the first women artist-run galleries
including A.I.R. Gallery and Soho 20. Her work is in many major public
and private collections. She is represented by I-20 Gallery in New York’s
Chelsea gallery district.