The College Art Association (CAA) has announced the recipients of the 2016 Awards for Distinction, which include artists Carrie Mae Weems and Carmen Herrera, and writer and art critic Rosalind E. Krauss.
Weems has been honored with the institution’s Distinguished Feminist Award, Krauss with the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art, and Herrera with the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Herrera, who turned 100 years old in May 2015, is currently preparing her first retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which will open next Fall.
The awards celebrate the outstanding contributions of individual artists, art historians, authors, conservators, curators, and critics “whose efforts transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large.”
Female professionals won 11 out of the 13 categories of the awards, pointing to the much-delayed but increasing recognition that women artists, curators, academics, and critics are finally receiving within the art world.
Other honorees include Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann, who received the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for curating the exhibition “New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic 1919–1933,” on view at Los Angele’s LACMA until January 18; Arlene Shechet, who won the Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work; Sabina Ott is the recipient of the Distinguished Teaching of Art Award; and Patricia Berger, who will take home the Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award.
The awards will be presented at a special ceremony that will be held on February 3 during the convocation at the CAA’s 104th Annual Conference in Washington DC, the largest gathering of artists, scholars, students, and arts professionals in the US. Both the convocation and the awards ceremony will be free and open to the public.
You can see the full list of winners and finalists here, which also includes Chika Okeke-Agulu, who won the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism for his book Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria.