COURTESY THOMA FOUNDATION
The winners of this year’s Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation awards for writing about digital art are San Francisco Museum of Modern Art curator Rudolf Frieling and Light Industry cofounder Ed Halter. This is the third year the awards were given out; last year’s winners were Nora Khan and Christiane Paul.
Frieling is currently the curator of media arts at SFMOMA, where he recently co-organized the museum’s Bruce Conner retrospective, which also appeared at New York’s Museum of Modern Art last year. He was previously a curator at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. As the Thoma Foundation’s established arts writer winner, Frieling will receive $40,000 ($30,000 unrestricted plus $10,000 as a project grant).
Halter is the foundation’s emerging arts writer winner—he will receive $20,000, including a $5,000 project grant. He is a cofounder of New York’s Light Industry, an experimental film space that he opened with Thomas Beard in 2008, and a critic in residence at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. In addition to writing regularly for 4Columns, he co-edited Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century with Lauren Cornell.
Frieling and Halter were selected from a pool of 30 nominees. The selection committee included Borusan Contemporary artistic director Kathleen Forde, Artforum editor-in-chief Michelle Kuo, and Chicago Film Archives curator Michelle Puetz.