Kim Gordon to Present 2015 Turner Prize, Completing Art-World Takeover

She's an artist, she's a musician, she's an award presenter.

Kim Gordon.
Photo Patrick McMullan.

Musician and artist Kim Gordon will present the Turner Prize this coming December.

The shortlist for the prize, announced this past May, includes three socially and politically engaged female artists as well as a housing collective: Bonnie Camplin, Janice Kerbel, Nicole Wermers, and the design and architecture collective Assemble.

The winner will be announced Monday, December 7 at Glasgow’s nonprofit arts organization Tramway, which began operation in the late 1980s as a performance venue in a former train terminus. The award is £40,000 (nearly $61,000), with £25,000 (just under $38,000) going to the winner and £5,000 each (about $7,500) for the other shortlisted artists.

An exhibition of the nominees’ work is on view at Tramway through January; artnet News’ Lorena Muñoz-Alonso is rooting for Wermers, as she wrote in an October review, saying, “Wermers’s Turner Prize project, and her oeuvre in general, has an evocative, intangible quality that only the best works of art have.”

Getting picked to present the prize is just the latest step in Gordon’s takeover of the art world. She signed on with New York’s 303 Gallery in 2014, and had her first solo show there this past summer. Also hosting Gordon solos have been Athens’ DESTE, Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles, and New York’s White Columns.

Gordon is better known as a founding member (with Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo) of the alt-rock band Sonic Youth, and now plays in the project Body/Head (with Bill Nace). But before she was a musician, she received her Master of Fine Arts at California’s Otis College of Art and Design, and first moved to New York with hopes of being an artist. She also for a time assisted Larry Gagosian, who was then selling posters.


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