2022 Lifetime Achievement Award Recipients

Lynda Benglis (b. 1941, Lake Charles, Louisiana) lives and works in New York; Santa Fe; Kastellorizo, Greece; and Ahmedabad, India. First recognized in the late 1960s for her poured latex and foam works, Benglis created work that was a perfectly timed retort to the male-dominated fusion of painting and sculpture with the advent of Process Art and Minimalism. Known for her exploration of metaphorical and biomorphic shapes, she is deeply concerned with the physicality of form and how it affects the viewer, using a wide range of materials to render dynamic impressions of mass and surface: soft becomes hard, hard becomes soft, and gestures are frozen.
Benglis’s work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at major museums around the world, including National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (2021) Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens, Greece (2019-2020); Kistefos-Museet, Norway (2018); Museo Internacional del Barroco, Puebla, Mexico (2016); Bergen Assembly, KODE Art Museums of Bergen, Norway (2016); Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2016); Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire, England (2015); and Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York (2015).
Benglis is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts grants, among other commendations. Her work is held in numerous public collections including Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Philadelphia Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Modern, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and many others.
Photo credit: Grace Roselli, Pandora’s BoxX Project Lynda Benglis, Cerrillos, New Mexico, 2021

Beate Minkovski is the co-founder and former executive director of Woman Made Gallery established in in Chicago in 1992. https://womanmade.org/

Initially opening WMG together with Kelly Hensen as their personal art studio, the art venue quickly transformed to offer exhibition opportunities to other women artists and has since 1992 exhibited the work by more than 9000 women from the national and international community in over 435 exhibitions.

Minkovski retired in December 2014 and served on WMG’s Board of Directors from March 2017 until June 2021. She is currently part of WMG’s Development Committee. 

In addition to her unwavering devotion to WMG and its important mission, Minkovski was active with Chicago arts organizations Intuit and ARC, and served on the Community Arts Assistance Program (CAAP) Panel for the Chicago Cultural Center from 2005 to 2008, and in 2012. Minkovski was part of the Special Service Area (SSA) #29 Commission jury panel for public art in Chicago’s West Town. She has curated exhibitions not just for WMG, but for various arts organizations, including the Women’s Caucus for Art, The Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota, and The Art Center in Highland Park, Illinois. She is the 2006 CWCA award recipient for achievements in the arts.

Originally from Bremen, Germany where she studied sculpture and ceramics, Beate came to the US in 1965, and continued her education earning a Bachelor of Arts at Northeastern Illinois University in 1992. She is married to Michael Minkovski and has five children and ten grandchildren.

Gladys Nilsson was born in Chicago in 1940, Gladys Nilsson studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She first came to prominence in 1966, when she joined five other recent Art Institute graduates (Jim Falconer, Art Green, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum) for the first of a series of group exhibitions called the Hairy Who. In 1990, she joined the faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Nilsson is known for her densely layered and meticulously constructed watercolors and collages, filled to the brim with winding, playful imagery.

Since 1966, Nilsson’s work has been the subject of over 50 solo exhibitions, including sixteen at Phyllis Kind Gallery (1970–1979, 1981–1983, 1987, 1991, and 1994, Chicago and New York), and two at The Candy Store (1971 and 1987, Folsom, California). Her work has also been featured in many important museum exhibitions, such as: Human Concern/Personal Torment (1969, Whitney Museum of American Art); Who

Chicago? (1981, Camden Art Center, London); Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art (1992, Los Angeles County Museum of Art); and Chicago Imagists (2011, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin).

Nilsson’s work is in the collections of major museums around the world, including: the Art Institute of Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin; the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Lorraine O’Grady (b. 1934) is a conceptual artist and cultural critic whose work over four decades has employed the diptych, or at least the diptych idea, as its primary form. While she has consistently addressed issues of diaspora, hybridity and black female subjectivity and has emphasized the formative roles these have played in the history of modernism, O’Grady also uses the diptych’s “both/and thinking” to frame her themes as symptoms of a larger problematic, that of the divisive and hierarchical either/or categories underpinning Western philosophy. In O’Grady’s works across various genres including text, photo-installation, video and performance, multiple emotions and ideas coexist. While O’Grady’s diptychs are sometimes explicit, with two images side by side, at other times they are implicit, as when two types of hair—silk and tumbleweed, videotaped on the same scalp at different hours of the same day—alternate and interact to create permeating worlds. The goal of her diptychs is not to bring about a mythic “reconciliation of opposites,” but rather to enable or even force a conversation between dissimilars long enough to induce familiarity. For O’Grady, the diptych helps to image the kind of “both/and” or “miscegenated” thinking that may be needed to counter and destabilize the West’s either/or binary of “winners or losers,” one that is continuously birthing supremacies, from the intimate to the political, of which white supremacy may be only the most all-inclusive.

O’Grady’s art works have been acquired by, among other institutions, the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; Tate Modern, London, UK; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. In 2021, Brooklyn Museum, NY organized a retrospective of her work, Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And.

Photo credit: Lorraine O’Grady, 2018. Photo by Ross Collab. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

Linda Vallejo creates work that visualizes what it means to be a person of color in the US. Her work reflects the experiences and knowledge gathered over four decades of study in the Latino, Chicano, and American indigenous communities.

In 1970–1980s Los Angeles she worked in the Chicano community with Self Help Graphics; the feminist community at the Women’s Building and African American community at William Grant Still Community Arts Center and Brockman Gallery. She owned Galeria Las Americas presenting contemporary Latino and Chicano artists and established A to Z Grantwriting beginning a lifelong career as a nonprofit consultant, instructor and coach.

In 2018, she participated in seven Getty Pacific Standard Time Initiatives, co-curating “Day of the Dead: A Legacy, Past, Present and Future” at Self Help Graphics and presenting the opening ceremony for the “Doin’ It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Women’s Building.” She was a visiting instructor for Otis College Public Practice MFA Program, a mentor for Mujeres de Maiz feminist collective; and volunteered for Native and Chicana Indigenous circles with a fifteen-year commitment to incarcerated women.

In 2022, “The Brown Solo Project” will be presented at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, CA. Past solos include La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, Texas A&M University; UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, Lancaster Museum of Art and History and the Soto Clemente Velez Cultural Center. Publications include The New York and Los Angeles Times, ArtNews, LA Weekly, and Artillery.

Permanent collections include the Museum of Sonoma County, Museo del Barrio, and National Museum of Mexican Art. Her archives are available digitally online and at UC Santa Barbara, California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives.

President’s Award for Art & Activism

Sabrina Nelson was born in the wake of the ‘67 Rebellion in Detroit, Michigan. She is a painter by degree from Detroit’s College for Creative Studies. Influenced by Yoruba Religion, as well as Eastern and African philosophies, Sabrina’s work is a combination of spirit, motion, and intimacy. She sees herself as a visual witness to the tumultuous times she lives in and reflects this in her work. The scope of her work includes sculpture, objects, murals and installations.

She has worked in arts administration at the College for Creative Studies and at the Detroit Institute of Arts for over 25 years and is committed to mentoring young artists and designers in the business of making it as an artist.

Sabrina has lectured on the preservation of Black Feminism in Art at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit. She is a guest curator at both The Carr Center and the Music Hall Performing Arts Center. She has judged numerous art competitions, curated art talks and exhibits, and conducted artist interviews for the City of Detroit’s Culture video channel MyDetroitCable. She is a 2021 Kresge Artist Fellow. Her work has been exhibited at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the African American Art in Culture complex in San Francisco, Art Basel and the American University in Paris. Her work is in the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History’s permanent collection and private collections throughout the US. sabrinanelsonart.com

Emerging Artist Award

Chicago artist and WCA member Ashley January’s work addresses the growing crisis of the Black maternal mortality and morbidity rate in America through painting and multimedia. While uplifting Black mothers and children, Ashley’s images and sound narratives serve as a call to action for more awareness, research, and eradication of unnecessary maternal and infant death in the United States of America.

Born in Rantoul, IL in 1987, Ashley received her MFA at the Laguana College of Art and Design in 2017 and her BS from Bradley University. She received the first-place award at Women Made Gallery’s 2018 Midwest Open Juried Exhibition for her piece, “Identity Fragmentation: A Self Portrait, 2017.” Her work, “Family Portrait” received the Beverly Bank Best of Show Award at the Beverly Art Center’s 2017 Annual Competition and she was a Round 3 Juried Winner for the 2016 ArtSlant Prize.

Ashley exhibits her work throughout the United States. She has volunteered her time for Girls STEAM Ahead which serves 7^th–12^th grade female students bringing them together with women working in STEAM fields; worked as a representative for the Laguana College of Art and Design for Graduate National Portfolio Day; and she sponsored a team in her son’s honor for the March of Dimes Annual March for Babies. She volunteers for her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, in their Target 1 initiative, #CAP (College Admission Process) which assists students applying to colleges. Through #CAP,  Ashley helps young women considering a profession in the arts. ashleyjan.com