Artist Catherine Telford Keogh is the inaugural winner of the Jack Galef Visible Arts Award.
New York Metropolis-based artist Catherine Telford Keogh has been chosen because the recipient of the Guggenheim Museum’s inaugural Jack Galef Visible Arts Award. The $50,000 prize is about to be awarded biennially to assist and have a good time “artists of remarkable expertise whose work demonstrates innovation, depth, and imaginative and prescient.”
By means of a present from the Jack Galef Property, the award comes three years after the Guggenheim formally pulled the plug on the Hugo Boss Prize, a no-strings-attached $100,000 award for artists throughout all media that was distributed biennially between 1996 and 2020. In a press assertion, Guggenheim Director and CEO mentioned that Telford Keogh “exemplifies the originality and depth this award seeks to champion.”
Telford Keough, who was chosen from a juried panel comprised of the museum’s curatorial division, has cultivated a research- and process-driven observe that analyzes assignments of worth and waste, in addition to behaviors of consumption and persistence, amongst different ideas tied to organic and commoditized lifecycles. Now primarily based in Brooklyn, the artist was born in Toronto and pursued studio artwork and gender research on the College of Waterloo earlier than incomes graduate levels in Sculpture and Girls, Gender, and Sexuality research at Yale College.
“I am honored to obtain this award, and the timing feels important,” Telford Keogh advised Hyperallergic in an electronic mail. Along with her observe, she’s additionally a school member at Parsons College of Design inside the New College, which not too long ago doled out sweeping college and program cuts amid a multimillion-dollar funds deficit and dwindling enrollment. In a restructuring plan, the New College not too long ago provided almost 40% of the full-time college members and all non-unionized workers early retirement or contract buyouts.
“This recognition arrives at a second when the circumstances for making and instructing really feel more and more precarious,” Telford Keogh continued, noting that New College college are navigating bureaucratic measures that “threaten the very interdisciplinarity that defines what we do: the porousness between inventive observe and significant inquiry that makes our neighborhood generative.”
“So receiving assist for my observe proper now feels each affirming and clarifying: it jogs my memory why we struggle for establishments that may maintain complexity, and why that struggle issues,” she mentioned.
Telford Keogh intends to make use of a portion of the prize to additional her analysis into the metabolic relationship between microbial life and industrial contaminants equivalent to petroleum byproducts and heavy metals inside the Gowanus Canal Superfund Website, telling Hyperallergic that the forthcoming mission “emerges from related questions on what will get valued, what will get discarded, and what persists anyway”
“I am enthusiastic about how this metabolism features as a form of inscription, these organisms writing their survival into the fabric substrate,” she defined. “The work is not about ‘cleansing up.’ It is about attending to types of life that thrive in circumstances we have written off, and asking which types of life we deem worthy of consideration.”
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