COURTESY HERB ALPERT FOUNDATION
The Herb Alpert Foundation announced the 2017 winners of its annual Award in the Arts, which are given out annually by the foundation and the California Institute of the Arts. Each award honors a mid-career artists and comes with an unrestricted $75,000 prize. This year’s winners are: Luciana Achugar for dance, Kerry Tribe for film/video, Eve Beglarian for music, Daniel Fish for theatre, and Amy Franceschini for visual arts.
Past winners have included Simone Leigh, Tania Bruguera, Emily Jacir, Roni Horn, and Kerry James Marshall.
“It’s particularly meaningful at this divisive moment to honor and support this year’s winners who are rigorous in their reach, alert to the world, and make community as much as they make art,” Irene Borger, the director of the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, said in a statement.
Below, Borger’s citation for each artist:
— Luciana Achugar, for her exciting, anarchic artistry, her big vision, her capacity to visualize and enact pleasure and beauty in the transcendent body, unflinching willingness to look at socio-political concerns and how they impact individuals, and no less than the creation of pagan experiences and ‘new rituals.’
— Kerry Tribe, for her fearlessness in rethinking and readdressing social issues, her ability to make surprising and moving connections, for her demanding, pleasurable, transformative, and accessible work. They value her empathetic, generous and rare ability to immerse her audiences in new ways of seeing the world.
— Eve Beglarian, for her prolific, engaging, and surprising body of work, her deep engagement with different communities, her dedication to continuing to make experimental work outside the canon, and her risk taking in both music and life with no separation between these spheres.
— Daniel Fish, for his mesmerizing, bold complex imagination, his steadfast commitment to the art of possibility, the ways he unceasingly questions what theatre might be, his amplification of ideas through his independent artistic explorations, and for his dedication to widening the forms for performance, enlarging ones experience in American theatre.
— Amy Franceschini, for her brave, ethical important cross-disciplinary work that grapples with critical issues of human survival, for her prescient intergenerational and transnational vision, her theoretical and conceptual reach and real-world applications, and for her engaged and collaborative citizenship.