The winners of the prestigious Wolf Prize were announced at a ceremony in Tel Aviv at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv on January 3, including Laurie Anderson and Lawrence Weiner, who have been honored with the “Israeli Nobel Prize” for art, the Jerusalem Post reports.
The artists were chosen for being “radical avant-garde artists” that will inspire future generations.
In June 2017, Anderson and Weiner will be awarded the prizes personally, along with six other recipients of the award in the fields of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and medicine, with a total of five $100,000 prizes awarded to the eight winners.
The ceremony will take place at the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem, and will be attended by President Reuven Rivlin.
The Wolf Prize is an initiative of the Wolf Foundation, which was founded in 1976 by Ricardo Wolf—a German inventor, philanthropist, and former Cuban ambassador to Israel—with an initial endowment fund of $10 million from the Wolf family.
Previous winners of the Wolf Prize in art include Olafur Eliasson in 2014, Rosemarie Trockel in 2011, Louise Bourgeois in 2002/3, and James Turrell in 1998. The art category was launched in 1981, when it was awarded to Marc Chagall and Antoni Tàpies.
Lawrence Weiner in 2016. Photo Johannes Simon/Getty Images.
Anderson, born in 1947 in the US, is known for experimental work in performance, sound, video, and music. She began performing in New York in the 1970s, and gained mainstream popularity with the 1981 single “O Superman” and its accompanying video.
Weiner, also from the US, was born in 1942, and became a central figure in conceptual art in the 1960s. His distinctive text-based works can be seen not only on the walls of museum and galleries, but also on their exteriors, and other surprising public spaces.