Awardee to receive 15,000 USD and a solo exhibition, opening November 4, 2011
Salt Lake Art Center and the Jarvis and Constance Doctorow Family Foundation are pleased to announce the inaugural recipient of the Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting: Kim Schoenstadt. Ms. Schoenstadt will receive a 15,000 USD award and a solo exhibition at the Art Center from November 4, 2011, through January 7, 2012.
Adam Price, Executive Director of Salt Lake Art Center, explains: “The Art Center is proud to be the home of the Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting, and I am thrilled to have an artist with the conceptual and technical depth of Ms. Schoenstadt as the first recipient. The generosity of the Doctorow Family Foundation gives Utahns the opportunity to experience exceptional contemporary painting from around the nation. ”
Ms. Schoenstadt embodies the spirit of the Doctorow Prize through her passionate dedication to a practice in contemporary painting. Her painterly, site-specific projects, which frequently include elements of audience participation, incorporate complex urban views, themes of modernist architecture, and historically informed explorations of image and society.
Writing in the Los Angeles Times, art critic Christopher Knight notes that Ms. Schoenstadt’s creations are those of “a view painter … . Unlike her 18th century forebears, however, who lived in a world where visual perception was being elastically stretched by telescopes, microscopes, and other ground-glass lenses meant to aid the limited range of a human eye, the Los Angeles artist surveys very different terrain. Her knotty work charts the intersection between the bricks and mortar of actual city streets and the effervescent elements of virtual reality. That’s where we live now.”
Ms. Schoenstadt has exhibited at: the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum, Hartford; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands; as well as locations in New York, Paris, Munich, Prague, and Istanbul. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, Artweek Magazine, and Art in America.
The process that led to Ms. Schoenstadt’s selection was a rigorous one. The Art Center received nominations from leading curators, critics, and educators around the country. The nominations were then reviewed by a jury comprising: Philipp Kaiser, Senior Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Shawn Rossiter, Editor, 15 Bytes; Scot Indrisek, Senior Editor, Modern Painters magazine; Adam Price, Executive Director, Salt Lake Art Center; Micol Hebron, Senior Curator, Salt Lake Art Center; and Suzanne Larson, representative of the Doctorow Family Foundation.
Ms. Larson remarked: “The distinguished nominators brought to light wonderful artists. Given a pool of such dedicated and talented painters, choosing a winner was extremely difficult. That being said, the Doctorow Family Foundation is very pleased to welcome Kim Schoenstadt as this year’s recipient. Our mother, Catherine, would be so pleased.” This is the first cycle of this bi-annual national painting prize that recognizes exceptional emerging and mid-career artists in the United States.
Salt Lake Art Center
Salt Lake Art Center is Utah’s premiere venue for contemporary art, and was recognized as Best Museum in the state of Utah for 2011. Founded in 1931, the Art Center exhibits groundbreaking work by local and international artists. Recent exhibitions include Robert Fontenot’s The Place This Is, a conceptual exploration of the stories and histories of Utah and America through materials from the domestic realm; and Lawn Gnomes Eat Your Hearts Out, a community public sculpture initiative designed to move contemporary art outside the four walls of the gallery. Current exhibitions include: Fallen Fruit of Utah, a state-wide collaboration with museums and individuals about the role of fruit in Utah’s history, led by Los Angeles artist collective Fallen Fruit. www.slartcenter.org
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