Yale Bulletin and Calendar

October 19, 2007|Volume 36, Number 7

Stockholder honored for ‘extensive
and ongoing’ artistic achievements

Yale School of Art professor Jessica Stockholder has been selected winner of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s annual Lucelia Artist Award, which is intended to encourage the artist’s future development and experimentation.

The $25,000 award recognizes Stockholder’s “extensive and ongoing achievement as an artist and celebrates her profound impact on generations of artists,” said the independent panel of jurors who selected the artist from a group of 13 nominees. (See related story.)

“Drawing on ready-made stuff of material culture, Stockholder transforms simple utilitarian objects into discrete sculptures and immersive environments that blur the boundaries between painting, sculpture and installation,” the jurors wrote in announcing the award. “Her rigorously formal abstract sculptures engage the viewer in a physical and perceptual encounter, which are at once highly evocative, yet resolutely unsentimental. Stock?holder’s careful calibration of color is also a crucial and distinctive element of her work. Not only does it call attention to the vivid palette of commonplace things, but also reflects and enlivens our experiences of the world.”

Established in 2001, the Lucelia Artist Award recognizes an American artist younger than 50 who has produced “a significant body of work and consistently demonstrates exceptional creativity.” Each year, five jurors with an extensive knowledge of contemporary art nominate artists to be considered for the award. This year’s jurors included David Joselit, professor and chair of art history at Yale.

Stockholder, a member of the faculty since 1999, is the director of graduate studies in sculpture at the School of Art. Born in Seattle, Washington, and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, she earned her B.F.A. from the University of Victoria in British Columbia and her M.F.A. from the Yale School of Art in 1985. Renowned for works that combine painting, sculpture and sometimes papier maché, she has created site-specific installations throughout North America and Europe, and her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Venice Biennale, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, among other venues. She has received numerous grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was recently one of the artists featured on the PBS television series “art:21,” a look at art in the 21st century.

In announcing the artist’s latest honor, Elizabeth Bround, the Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian Museum, commented,“Jessica Stockholder’s exuberant and complex structures and installations embody the spirit of innovation and creativity that the museum’s Lucelia Artist Award hopes to foster.”

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