Hamza Walker, Director of Education and Associate Curator of The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago

Congratulations to Hamza Walker, curator at The Renaissance Society — it has just been announced that he’s won the Ordway Prize from Creative Link for the Arts and the New Museum!  Walker, along with artist Artur Żmijewski, will receive an unrestricted award of $100,000. Here’s the text of the announcement in full:

“Creative Link for the Arts and the New Museum have announced Hamza Walker, the Director of Education and Associate Curator at Chicago’s Renaissance Society, and Polish artist Artur Żmijewski, as the recipients of the Ordway Prize. An international panel of Nominators and a Jury of leading arts world figures-led by Jennifer McSweeney, Director of Creative Link for the Arts, and Richard Flood, Chief Curator at the New Museum-selected the Ordway Prize recipients from a global pool of nominees. Walker and Żmijewski will each receive an unrestricted cash prize of $100,000.

“Working with artists is a reward in itself, and I feel privileged at being so generously honored for my passion. I wish I had a grand vision for the award, but as it stands, the bricks and mortar of my life are in severe need of tuckpointing,” said Hamza Walker.

“I was happy to be nominated for the Ordway Prize, but winning was quite unexpected. My art is important to me, and now it has been recognized by others in a significant way and that pleases me immensely. The considerable amount of money that comes with this award will surely help to realize my future projects,” said Artur Zmijewski.

The Ordway Prize is named for the naturalist, philanthropist, and arts patron Katherine Ordway. The prize acknowledges the contributions of a Curator/Arts Writer and an Artist whose work has had significant impact on the field of contemporary art, but who has yet to receive broad public recognition. Nominees for the Ordway Prize are midcareer talents between the ages of forty and sixty-five, with a developed body of work extending over a minimum of fifteen years.

Jennifer McSweeney, Director of Creative Link for the Arts, noted that “the award honors past achievements, but it is equally dedicated to future promise. Hamza Walker’s and Artur Żmijewski’s work investigates and reveals the possibilities of humanity and is dedicated to celebrating life with all its limitations and aspirations. Both use their immeasurable talents to expose the frailties and conundrums that challenge mankind’s psyche, all the while giving hope to the viewer via the enlightenment offered by their difficult and honest questions.”

Richard Flood, Chief Curator at the New Museum said, “It’s very easy to fall in love with the young and reward them for being young. It’s a different thing to reward contributors like Hamza and Artur who have quietly and steadfastly dedicated their lives to the continuity of creativity. The Ordway Prize is a way of saying thank you for holding down the fort and moving the conversation forward; thank you for changing the way we understand the world.”

The Ordway Prize is the only unrestricted international award of this caliber that recognizes a Curator/Arts Writer and it is also one of the most generous awards given to a contemporary Artist. Past Ordway Prize recipients have included: Curator/Arts Writer Ralph Rugoff and Artist Doris Salcedo (2006); and Curator/Arts Writer James Elaine and Artist Cildo Meireles (2008).

ABOUT THE RECIPIENTS

Ordway Prize Winner: Curator/Arts Writer
Hamza Walker was born in 1966 in New York City, and currently lives in Chicago, where he is the Director of Education and Associate Curator for the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. He is also on the faculty of The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. He has written for Trans, New Art Examiner, Parkett, and Artforum, and penned catalogue essays on Darren Almond, Rebecca Morris, Giovanni Anselmo, Thomas Hirschhorn, Moshekwa Langa, and Katharina Grosse. Walker’s most recent exhibition at the Renaissance Society, a solo exhibition of photographs by Chicago-based artist Anna Shteynshleyger, is currently on view through February 14, 2010. He will also organize the first United States exhibition of works by Antwerp native Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven in 2010. Past curatorial projects at the Renaissance Society include “Several Silences” (2009); “Black Is, Black Ain’t” (2008); “Kateřina Sedá” (2008); “Meanwhile, in Baghdad” (2007); “All the Pretty Corpses” (2005); “A Perfect Union…More or Less” (2004); and “New Video, New Europe” (2004). Walker currently is on the boards of Noon, a literary annual publishing short fiction; Lampo, a new and experimental-music presenter; and The Chicago Public Art Group. Prior to his work at the Renaissance Society, Walker was the Public Art Coordinator for the City of Chicago, Department of Cultural Affairs. He has served on numerous panels locally and internationally, and is the recipient of the 1999 Norton Curatorial Grant and the 2005 Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement.

Ordway Prize Winner: Artist
Artur Żmijewski was born in 1966 in Warsaw, Poland, where he currently lives and works. Most recently, Żmijewski presented a selection of works for the Museum of Modern Art’s “Projects 91″ series. His latest film, Sculpture Plein-air. Swiecie 2009, which premiered as part of “Projects 91″, records one of a series of staged workshops organized and documented by the artist in which the participants are invited to create art. Żmijewski asked seven artists from different parts of Poland to collaborate with steel workers in Swiecie, a small city disengaged from the contemporary art world, to create and install public sculptures. The project was modeled after similar collaborations between artists and workers in Elblag, Poland, in the late 1960s, which were inspired by utopian goals of a classless society and the union of art making and industrial technology. In 2009, the Cornerhouse presented the artist’s first major United Kingdom survey. In 2008, Żmijewski showed Oko za Oko (An Eye for an Eye) in the New Museum’s “After Nature” exhibition. In 2007-08, he was a DAAD Artists in Residence in Berlin, Germany. Żmijewski participated in Documenta 12 in 2007, and Manifesta 4 in 2002. In 2005, his film Repetition was shown in the Polish Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale. In 2000, he was given the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Per L’Arte Prize for Oko za Oko. He studied at the Faculty of Sculpture of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw from 1990-95, and received his diploma from the studio of Professor Grzegorz Kowalski in 1995.

ABOUT CREATIVE LINK FOR THE ARTS
Creative Link for the Arts is a privately funded nonprofit organization dedicated to facilitating partnership in philanthropy and forging innovative relationships between art institutions, nonprofits, corporations, and philanthropists interested in supporting the arts and creating a cultural legacy.

ABOUT THE NEW MUSEUM
Founded in 1977, the New Museum is a leading destination for new art and new ideas. It is Manhattan’s only dedicated contemporary art museum and is respected internationally for the adventurousness and global scope of its curatorial program. For more information, visit newmuseum.org.”

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Anna Shteynshleyger, Nylon Challah. 2004-2009

While I was looking at the photographs of Anna Shteynshleyger at the opening of this Russian-born, Chicago-based artist’s new solo exhibition at at The Renaissance Society, a middle-aged woman wearing a fluffy, faux-fur coat sidled up next to me. “Do you know what that is?” she asked me, pointing to the image I was peering at intently. It was a blue-tinged photograph of some sort of twisted, fleshy material that looked like raw bread dough.

“I’m not exactly sure,” I replied. “I can’t tell if it’s soaking in a bowl of something or what.”

“It looks organic,” the woman mused, “like an organ from a body.”

“Well, it’s challah….It’s not baked yet. But I can’t make out what this part is,” I said, gesturing to the circular, fan-like opening out of which the doughy form appeared to be rising.

“Oh, it’s challah!?” she exclaimed. “I know what challah is — I make challah. But that looks more like a body part. How do you pronounce the artist’s name?” I told her I had no idea, and she nodded. “She should have changed it to Smith!”

We both laughed at that one. Jewish immigrants have a long history of changing their names in order to better assimilate with WASP culture. They made them shorter, more easily pronounceable, less foreign-sounding. In other words, less Jewish. As it turned out, the photograph that so bemused us both wasn’t actually of challah at all. It was stuffing material, the kind used to plump up toys, that had been crammed into a pair of nylons and “braided” in the manner of challah, the iconic Jewish bread that, among other things, is integral to the Shabbat blessings performed each Friday night in observant Jewish homes.

Shteynshleyger makes photographs about her life, and Shteynshleyger, a woman in her early thirties with two young children, is an observant Jew. And yet, although a few of the images display signifiers of Jewish family life and Jewish culture (candlesticks, kippot, tzitzit) they are adamantly not about “being Jewish,” nor are they meant to portray contemporary Orthodox life in documentary fashion.  Instead, exhibition curator Hamza Walker and Shteynshleyger argue, these images are about biography: its limits and possibilities, its intimate relationship to mundane fact and its kinship with fiction. But since Shteynshleyger’s Jewishness is part of her biography, the show inevitably circles back to the artist’s Jewish identity–”an extraordinarily tricky subject to deal with,” as Walker characterized it during his public talk with Shteynshleyger on Sunday.

Elisha, 2004-2009.

And how. What might be read by many as a discomfort with the idea of Jewishness and to some degree with Judaism itself that runs throughout this show could be read by others simply as a desire to represent things as matter-of-factly as possible. People are not “prettied up.” Adolescent girls look like adolescent girls (even more so, because the young Orthodox women in these images wear no makeup). Food often looks unsavory. The dirty tile and curtain in a hotel bathroom is allowed to look ugly, to convey the disgust that the artist herself felt upon regarding it for the first time.

Early on in her conversation with Walker, Shteynshleyger admitted that the Jewish part of her identity was perfectly happy with the artist part, but the artist side of her often felt “very embarrassed” about the Jewish part.

Masha, 2004-2009

Ester 2004-2009

“Nobody wants to be a Jew,” Shteynshleyger asserted, quite provocatively, right after making this admission. She added that Jews deal with the ambivalence of Jewishness by becoming either really secular or really religious. In Shteynshleyger’s own photographs, this ambivalence is registered via images culled directly from her own life and yet which reveal very little about that life. “I want to make a work about biography, but I don’t really want to talk about myself…it’s like that,” Shteynshleyger explained during the  talk.

Covered, 2004-2009

There are several portraits of heterosexual married couples in this show, all of them Jewish. The men wear kippot and tzitzit. The women wear calf-length skirts and shirts with long sleeves. In all of the photographs, the couples sit with their bodies touching. Unsmiling, they stare directly into the camera, completely aware of their subjectivity at that moment. Shteynshleyger has included herself in one of these photographs, pregnant and sitting next to a man named Mordechai. She is ostensibly coupled in a manner similar to the rest, but the truth of the matter lies outside of the image, for we learn via a cryptic line in the exhibition’s essay (and explicitly during the public conversation, when the artist referred to her “ex-husband”) that Shteynshleyger is not (or at least, is no longer) one of those happily married couples.

Portrait With Mordechai, 2004-2009.

Throughout the show there is a sense of perpetual covering and uncovering, of surface blemishes laid bare in order to obscure other, more complicated and less communicable aspects of personal and cultural identity, Jewish or otherwise. During their conversation, Shteynshleyger expressed gratitude to Walker for his refusal to put her work into a “curatorial box” by framing it, as she put it, as “a Jewish show” or making it into a better-looking exhibition by selecting only those images that project the disembodied romanticism and gauzy allure seen in works like Ester or Masha. This is indeed a “tricky” exhibition: distinctly un-beautiful, anti-nostalgic, ambivalent towards the notion of an overarching cultural or religious identity and yet unapologetically embedded within the web of family and religious community. It’s a show made all the trickier by the modesty of Shteynshleyger herself: a woman, a mother, an artist and a Jew who makes images that spring from all those experiences and yet speak directly to none of them.

Chaya Mushka, 2004-2009

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The prize acknowledges the contributions of a Curator/Arts Writer and an Artist whose work has had significant impact on the field of contemporary art, but who has yet to receive broad public recognition. Finalists for the Ordway Prize are midcareer talents between the ages of forty and sixty-five, with a developed body of work extending over a minimum of fifteen years.

Now, it’s always great to see behind-the-scenes culture professionals get recognized for their outstanding work. This goes double for curators, who get paid relatively little and yet play such a critical role in bringing art to the public.  So if a little cash gets thrown at said curators while recognizing their contributions to the field, that’s nice too. I’m not of the view that culture workers need to be poor to have integrity. That said, however, I think that $100,000  is an inordinate amount of money given the fact that a) the prize is unrestricted and b) this year’s nominees, as well as past Ordway Prize winners, are institutionally-affiliated curators as opposed to those working independently and earning income on a project-by-project basis.

Almost every other aspect of the Ordway Prize sits just fine with me. I support the effort to recognize midcareer professionals who have 15 + year track records and who have repeatedly shown themselves to be innovators in their field. Past Ordway Prize winners in the curator/art writer category include Ralph Rugoff, director of the Heyward Gallery in London, and James Elaine, curator of Hammer Projects at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. I’ve worked with both of them and have the utmost admiration and respect for each. As I see it, the issue isn’t about merit, it’s about money, specifically how much unrestricted money it’s appropriate to award to arts professionals who are already receiving a salary and deriving research and exhibition budgets directly from their own institutions.

One hundred grand is a lot of cash. Why so much? If the prize is meant as a pat on the back, 25 or even 50 grand really ought to do it.  But a $100,000 pat on the back? That seems excessive, and more like an attention grab on the part of Creative Link that gives one curator queen for a day status while the rest go about their business as usual. Perhaps there’s an underlying assumption that part of the prize money will enable the curator/arts writer to pursue a “dream project.” However, if that project eventually takes the form of an exhibition, it’s appropriate that the curator’s institution generate the budget and foot the bill, travel and research included.

I’m all for professional plaudits and even for reasonable monetary infusions that provide creative professionals with the physical and yes, emotional resources to think big(ger). But I don’t think culture professionals need to be quite so richly rewarded for doing what is, after all, their job, and I’m pretty sure that no single curator/art writer warrants $100,000 worth of peer affirmation. Not when it’s unrestricted, anyway.

Got a response to this post? Let us know! Email your comments to  mail@badatsports.com. We’ll feature thoughtful responses to issues generated by our posts in our Letters to the Editors Feature on Saturdays.

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Tania Bruguera

Two Chicagoans have been announced as candidates for the Ordway Prize. Tania Bruguera, who splits her time between Havana Cuba and Chicago, and The Renaissance Society’s Hamza Walker are up for the prize with a handful of other artists and curators.  The prize “recognizes both a mid-career curator/arts writer and an artist with an unrestricted award of $100,000″

via The New Museum:

” Now in its third cycle, the Ordway Prize is the only unrestricted international award of this caliber that recognizes a Curator/Arts Writer and is also one of the most generous awards given to a contemporary Artist.

Candidates for the Ordway Prize are identified through an anonymous nomination process of submissions drawn from a global pool of curators, writers, artists, and museum directors, led by Jennifer McSweeney, Director of Creative Link for the Arts, and Richard Flood, Chief Curator at the New Museum. A jury composed of leading arts professionals will select the two Ordway Prize recipients. The Ordway Prize winners will be announced in early 2010.”

Check out Claudine’s coverage of Tina Bruguera’s “Cocaine Performance”

Check out Brian, Richard, Duncan, and I interview Hamza Walker in Episode 60.

For more info on the Ordway Prize check out The New Museum’s site.

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Tristan Al-Haddad, Virtual Doubling, 2008

Ruth Dusseault, Mill Substructure, During Demolition (Atlantic Steel Project), 2000

Graffiti bus, Highway 80, 2006

Angela West, Untitled Portrait #12 (from Sweet 16 series), 2002

For three consecutive days (March 26-28, 2009), three internationally prominent jurors—Jeffrey Grove (Wieland Family Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art, High Museum of Art, Atlanta), Clara Kim (Gallery Director and Curator, REDCAT, Los Angeles) and Hamza Walker (Associate Curator and Director of Education, The Renaissance Society, Chicago)—conducted studio visits with 15 short-listed artists drawn from nearly 300 applicants throughout Greater Atlanta (23-county area) for the inaugural Artadia Awards in Atlanta. The awards range from $15,000 to $3,000.

The Artadia Awardees 2009 Atlanta at the $15,000 level are: Don Cooper and Jerry Siegel. The five recipients of the $3,000 awards are Tristan Al-Haddad, Ruth Dusseault, Fahamu Pecou, Larry Walker, and Angela West. In honor of Atlanta arts patron Judith Alexander, Don Cooper has been named the Judith Alexander Artadia Awardee.

Artadia Founder and President Christopher Vroom said of the inaugural program in Atlanta, “The vibrancy of any creative community relies upon a network of committed individuals, institutions, foundations and others, working together to ensure that cultural legacies are not only celebrated but extended. Artists, situated at the foundation of creative production, play a critical role not only in their unique ability to help us see the world in new ways but also in their capacity as educators, mentors and civic leaders. Artadia is thrilled to add Atlanta’s thriving community to our growing national network of support for artists. The city’s cultural institutions, schools, foundations, non-profit spaces, galleries and arts patrons have nurtured a terrific artistic community. We are proud to be a part of it and to extend the visibility of its institutions and artists across the country.”

Local juror Jeffrey Grove stated: “I am always supportive of programs that provide direct grants to individual artists to enable them to do what they must do. The Artadia Awards program in Atlanta provides local artists with national recognition for their achievements, access to internationally recognized curators from other cities, and an ongoing network of new connections and opportunities.”

Hamza Walker added, “For a town whose arts community prides itself on self-reliance, Atlanta is giving Chicago a run for its money. The panel process was a terrific opportunity to meet these very talented Atlanta artists. Having known Artadia well from Chicago since 2001, it is exciting to be part of adding this important city to the national network.”

Applications for the Artadia Awards were open to visual artists in all media and at any stage of their career working and living in Greater Atlanta, GA. The application was available online for three months from September 1 to December 1, 2008. The three first round jurors—Naomi Beckwith (Assistant Curator, Studio Museum Harlem, New York), Lisa Cremin (Director, Metropolitan Atlanta Arts Fund), and Jeffrey Grove (Wieland Family Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art, High Museum of Art, Atlanta)—reviewed 292 applications and selected the finalists in New York February.

Artadia is grateful for the visionary support of the Atlanta program from the Common Good Funds of The Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta, the Judith Alexander Foundation, and many generous individuals.

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