Herb Alpert Award in the Arts Announces Winners for 2024

The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts announces this year's ten winners and celebrates its 30th anniversary.

SANTA MONICA, Calif., May 2, 2024 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- "I've always loved the artists that travel the road less traveled…those are the artists that touch me." Herb Alpert

May 2, 2024 will mark the 30th anniversary awards celebration of the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (HAAIA) which will be presented to ten risk-taking, mid-career artists – experimenters - who are challenging and transforming art, their respective disciplines, and society. Fifteen highly regarded leaders in the arts made up the panels reviewing the candidates and selected two award recipients in each of five disciplines: dance, film/video, music, theatre and visual arts.

The 2024 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts winners:

DANCE: Jonathan González, Mariana Valencia

FILM/VIDEO: Nuotama Bodomo, Lucy Raven

MUSIC: Huang Ruo, Anna Webber

THEATRE: Robin Frohardt, Cannupa Hanska Luger

VISUAL ARTS: Marina Rosenfeld, Marie Watt

The awards were founded and conceived by legendary musician, philanthropist and artist Herb Alpert, and his Grammy-winning vocalist wife, Lani Hall. Now in its 30th year, the HAAIA has to date been awarded to 174 artists. Each award includes a $75,000 unrestricted prize and residency at CalArts (California Institute of the Arts) which administers the prize on behalf of the Herb Alpert Foundation.

Herb Alpert and Lani Hall created the Herb Alpert Foundation in 1985 and over thirty-nine years and more than $200 million dollars later, Herb Alpert remains one of America's most important and loyal advocates for the arts and arts education.

Among the past HAAIA winners are noted artists: Carrie Mae Weems, Taylor Mac, Suzan-Lori Parks, Julia Wolfe, Michelle Dorrance, Tania Bruguera, Kerry James Marshall, Lisa Kron, Sharon Lockhart, Ralph Lemon, Arthur Jafa, Cai Guo-Qiang, Okwui Okpokwasili and Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah to name a few.

Irene Borger, Director of HAAIA since its inception in 1994, reflects on the Award's continued importance in honoring experimental artists attentive to the turbulence of American life. "At this moment of increasingly retrograde laws and maneuvers, Herb Alpert Awardees are engaged in rigorous investigations, invigorating new forms with deep questions and propositions for alternative, necessary, and more humane futures."

Rona Sebastian, President of the Herb Alpert Foundation added,"Herb and Lani Alpert continue their decades-long commitment to support those art makers and performing artists who, in grappling with our challenging world, are creating innovative, vital, and necessary work."

"The generosity of Herb and Lani is legendary, and their work supporting artists to take risks, through The Alpert Awards, has propelled artmaking in this country for decades, " said CalArts President Ravi Rajan. "The list of past honorees is testament to how the award gives artists the space and time to create work that transforms the world."

The following summaries highlight why the 2024 panelists chose these ten extraordinary artists:

DANCE PANEL SUMMARY
The Dance panel celebrates choreographer Jonathan González for his "compelling, provocative work, his commitment to collaborating with artists of different disciplines, bringing together different bodies, for his thoughtful, generous relationship with audiences, and the ways he has created 'beautiful chaos.'"

The Dance panel honors choreographer Mariana Valencia's "rigorous, intelligent, work, riveting performances, and beautiful movement. She magically accesses the political through the deeply personal, expanding dance beyond the studio and leaving audiences alchemically transformed to reflect on and expand into a larger, political conversation."

DANCE PANELISTS
John Andress, Bill T. Jones Director and Curator of Performing Arts,
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA
Stanford Makishi, Vice President & Artistic Director, Dance, New
York City Center, New York, NY
Charmaine Warren, Founder/Artistic Director, Black Dance Stories;
Dance on the Lawn-Montclair Dance Festival; Producer,
DanceAfrica@BAM; former curator, E-Moves Harlem Stage,
Montclair, NJ

FILM/VIDEO PANEL SUMMARY
The Film/Video panel recognizes filmmaker Nuotama Bodomo for the "uniquely propositional core of her practice and its commitment to a specificity of voices, for her vision without compromise." They "appreciate her drive to locate other grounds for speaking, not in opposition to but in an unrelenting attempt to actualize the impossible, to re-learn to speak from scratch."

Moved by her "rare mastery of form and sophisticated insistence on collapsing the contexts between cinema and contemporary art and her commitment to radical forms of address," the Film/Video panel celebrates filmmaker and artist Lucy Raven. "Her work not only understands that history and lineage of avant-garde and structuralist film, but sees beyond it, taking film form to new places."

FILM/VIDEO PANELISTS
Pablo de Ocampo, Director and Curator of Moving Image, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN
Arthur Jafa, artist, filmmaker, theorist, Herb Alpert Award Artist, Los Angeles
Leslie Thornton, artist, Herb Alpert Award Artist, Croton-on-Hudson, NY

MUSIC PANEL SUMMARY
The Music panel honors composer Huang Ruo for his "substantial and meaningful body of work, his choice of subject matter, compelling collaborations, carefully considered contexts, and strong voice." They "appreciate his exquisite craft and the inventive ways he continues to mine and transform multiple musical traditions as well as his sense of both empathy and responsibility for reanimating what has been misnamed, forgotten and obscured."

Valuing "her astute multiplicity as both composer and gifted performer," the Music panel celebrates composer, saxophonist, and flautist Anna Webber's "deeply researched and imaginative music" and her "clearly clearly-thought-through spacious explorations of multiple musical languages, bringing together – and creatively expanding - what have often been disparate worlds."

MUSIC PANELISTS
Steve Coleman, musician, composer, Herb Alpert Award Artist, Allentown, PA
Adam Fong, composer, San Francisco, CA
Julia Wolfe, composer, Herb Alpert Award Artist, New York, NY

THEATRE PANEL SUMMARY
Theatre artist Robin Frohardt was selected by the Theatre Panel for the ways in which "her rigor, detail, and whimsy envelop, guide, humor, and move us." They thank her for "not scaling back her imagination, for blending her artistic practices into meticulously-crafted singular expressions. complex, BIG ideas illuminated by the quotidian." In her work, they see "an intrinsic understanding of the direction we need to head towards – both in theatre and in the world beyond - for our survival as a field and as a species."

Interdisciplinary artist Cannupa Hanska Luger is being celebrated by the Theatre panel for "intersecting the social and political dynamics with purposive spectacle, for his intense and expansive work's aesthetic beauty which acts as an elixir to simultaneously enhance and coat its power. His work expands the construct of performance, infusing symbology and ancestral tradition with protest. A knife to the throat of humanity, these provocations demand action."

THEATRE PANELISTS
Nataki Garrett, co-artistic director, One Nation/One Project, San Francisco Bay
Maria Goyanes, artistic director, Woolly Mammoth Theater, Washington, DC
Meiyin Wang, Director of Producing and Programming, Perelman Performing Arts Center, New York, NY

VISUAL ARTS PANEL SUMMARY
Artist Marina Rosenfeld was chosen Visual Arts prizewinner for "the rigorousness of her practice, and commitment to developing new strategies and expanding the limits of known forms." They were impressed by "her experimental gestures through sound and composition in creating complex structures via elegant formal means." They view the way her "deeply felt" projects are "rooted in sensation, creating playful spaces which push the boundaries of communication and understanding."

Artist Marie Watt was named Visual Arts prizewinner for "the ways she activates community, histories, and Indigenous ideas through materials which become more fully alive through performance and interactivity. Viewing "the constellation of interconnectedness at the center of her practice as a very powerful and deeply rooted methodology," they appreciate the way her "life-affirming work facilitates spaces of collective listening and making through her open and generous practice."

VISUAL ARTS PANELISTS
Ruth Estévez, independent curator and writer, New York and Mexico City.
Emily Jacir, artist, Herb Alpert Award Artist, Bethlehem and Rome
Tanya Lukin Linklater, artist, Herb Alpert Award Artist, Nbisiing Anishnaabeg aki

 The 30th HAAIA awards celebration will be held virtually on Thursday, May 2, 2024

Media Contact

Caroline Graham, C4 Global Communications, 310-487-2881, [email protected]

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