2010 WINNER  |  Sandford Biggers  |  Visual Artist

A native of Los Angeles, California, and current New York resident, Sanford Biggers has won several awards including the New York Percent for the Arts Commission, Art Matters Grant, and the New York Foundation for the Arts Award in performance

Mr. Biggers has also participated in several prestigious national and international artist residencies and fellowships including Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California, ARCUS Project Foundation, Ibaraki, Japan, and He has been a fellow of the Socrates Sculpture Park Residency, the P.S. 1 International Studio Program, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency.

Sanford Biggers' installations, videos, and performances have appeared in venues worldwide including the Tate Britain and Tate Modern, London, the Whitney Museum and Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, as wellas institutions in China, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Poland and Russia.

Sanford has been included in several notable shows such as Prospect 1/ New Orleans Biennial and Illuminations at the Tate Modern, Performa 07. He has also had solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, London, New York, Berkeley, Kansas City and in Europe and the Far East.

Biggers is presently full time faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University Sculpture and Expanded Media program and was a visiting scholar and artist in residence at Harvard University in 2009.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER  |  James Rosenquist  |  Visual Artist

Jim Rosenquist had an itinerant childhood. An only child he moved with his family frequently throughout the Midwest. In 1957, after moving to New York, James Rosenquist joined the sign painters union and in 1958 went to work for ArtKraft Strauss Company painting billboards. He also worked on window displays for Bonwit Teller and Tiffany. By 1960 Mr. Rosenquist had set aside enough of his commercial earnings to allow him to spend a year painting in his studio. He moved to Coenties Slip in Manhattan, where he shared a loft with Charles Hinman. Mr. Rosenquist had tentatively explored the use of commercial methods and materials in his studio work of the late 1950s but after his move to the Slip, he left behind both the abstract expressionist and figurative modes he had employed in his early work and developed the montage like arrangement of deliberately fragmented images from popular culture - that characterized the monumental paintings of his mature style.

Mr. Rosenquist had his first one-man exhibition at the Green Gallery in New York in 1962, and every painting was sold. In 1963 he completed a mural for the New York World's Fair, and Art in America selected him as "Young Talent Painter" of the year. Two years later the artist finished painting the monumental, highly publicized F-111, which toured Europe during the 1960s and has been considered an important expression of the anti-Vietnam War movement. During the 1970s he became active in issues of artists' rights legislation. In 1976 Mr. Rosenquist built his house and studio in Aripeka, FL. Since the early 1960s, Rosenquist has worked extensively at numerous printmaking workshops in addition to Graphicstudio, including Aeropress, Gemini G.E.L., Petersburg Press, Styria Studio, Tyler Graphics, Ltd., and Universal Limited Art Editions. Among Rosenquist's honors is the World Print Award, which he received in 1983 from the World Print Council at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

(Bio – Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.)

Highlights

PHOTOS
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2009 WINNER  |  Craig Lucas  |  Playwright

Craig Lucas' plays include Missing Persons, Blue Window, Reckless, God's Heart, The Dying Gaul, Stranger, Small Tragedy, Prayer For My Enemy and The Singing Forest. He wrote the book for The Light In The Piazza, music and lyrics by Adam Guettel; the musical play Three Postcards, music and lyrics by Craig Carnelia; the libretto for the opera Orpheus in Love, music by Gerald Busby; and he has recently completed the libretto for Two Boys, an opera with composer Nico Muhly, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and scheduled to premiere there in a co-production with the English National Opera. His new English adaptations include Brecht’s Galileo, Chekhov's Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya, and Strindberg’s Miss Julie. His screenplays include Longtime Companion (Sundance Audience Award), The Secret Lives of Dentists (New York Film Critics Best Screenplay), Prelude to a Kiss, Reckless and The Dying Gaul, which he also directed. Twice nominated for a Tony (Prelude to a Kiss and The Light in the Piazza), three times for the Drama Desk (Prelude, Missing Persons and Reckless), he has won the L.A. Drama Critics Award (Blue Window), the Steinberg/American Theater Critics Award for Best American Play (The Singing Forest), the Hull-Warriner Award (The Light in the Piazza), the LAMBDA Literary Award (for his anthology What I Meant Was), the Flora Roberts Award, the Excellence in Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Laura Pels/PEN Mid-Career Achievement Award and the Joan Cullman Award; he has twice won the Obie Award for Best Play (Prelude and Small Tragedy). He graduated from Boston University where he studied with poets Anne Sexton and George Starbuck. Lucas serves as Associate Artistic Director at the Intiman Theater in Seattle.

WINNER  |  Eve Beglarian  |  Composer

Eve Beglarian "is a humane, idealistic rebel and a musical sensualist."* "One of new music's truly free spirits,"** and a "remarkable experimentalist,"*** she is a composer, performer, and audio producer whose music is "an eclectic and wide-open series of enticements." Her chamber, choral, and orchestral music has been commissioned and widely performed by the Los Angeles Master Chorale, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the California EAR Unit, the Orchestra of St. Luke's, Relâche, the Paul Dresher Ensemble, Sequitur, the American Composers Orchestra, Maya Beiser, Lauren Flanigan, and Marya Martin, among many other groups and individuals. Highlights of her work in music theater includes music for Mabou Mines' Obie-winning Dollhouse, Animal Magnetism, Ecco Porco, and Choephorai directed by Lee Breuer; Forgiveness, a collaboration with Chen Shi-Zheng and Noh master Akira Matsui; and the China National Beijing Opera Theater's production of The Bacchae, also directed by Chen Shi-Zheng. She has collaborated with choreographers including Victoria Marks, Ann Carlson, Susan Marshall, and David Neumann, and with visual and video artists including Shirin Neshat, Kevork Mourad, Cory Arcangel, Barbara Hammer, and Anne Bray. Performance projects include Songs from a Book of Days, The Story of B, Open Secrets, Hildegurls’ Ordo Virtutum, twisted tutu, and typOpera. Recordings of Eve's music are available on Koch, New World, Canteloupe, CRI Emergency Music, OO Discs, Accurate Distortion, Atavistic, and Kill Rock Stars. A recording of Hildegurls’ Ordo Virtutum is forthcoming on Innova.

* Josef Woodard, The Los Angeles Times
** Kyle Gann, The Village Voice
*** Albert Innaurato, The New York Times

KEYNOTE SPEAKER   |  David Lang  |  Composer

Audiences around the globe are hearing more and more of David Lang's work: in performances by such organizations as the Santa Fe Opera, the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, The Cleveland Orchestra, and the Kronos Quartet; at Tanglewood, the BBC Proms, The Munich Biennale, the Settembre Musica Festival, the Sidney 2000 Olympic Arts Festival and the Almeida, Holland, Berlin, Strasbourg and Huddersfield Festivals; in theater productions in New York, San Francisco and London; in the choreography of Twyla Tharp, La La La Human Steps, The Nederlands Dans Theater and the Royal Ballet; and at Lincoln Center, the South Bank Centre, Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the Barbican Centre, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Recent projects include The Little Match Girl Passion, commissioned by Carnegie Hall for Paul Hillier's vocal ensemble Theater of Voices and for which Lang was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Music; Writing On Water for the London Sinfonietta, with visuals by English filmmaker Peter Greenaway; The Difficulty of Crossing a Field — a fully staged opera for the Kronos Quartet;Loud Love Songs, a concerto for the percussionist Evelyn Glennie, and the oratorio Shelter, with co-composers Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe, at the Next Wave Festival of the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

In addition to the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in music, Lang's numerous honors and awards include the Rome Prize, the BMW Music-Theater Prize (Munich), and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1999 he received a Bessie Award for his music for choreographer Susan Marshall's The Most Dangerous Room in the House, performed live by the Bang on a Can All-Stars at the Next Wave Festival of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The Carbon Copy Building won the 2000 Village Voice OBIE Award for Best New American Work. The CD recording of The Passing Measures was named one of the best CDs of 2001 by The New Yorker magazine. Lang is cofounder and co-artistic director of New York's legendary music festival, Bang on a Can.


Highlights

PHOTOS
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VIDEO
David Lang
Keynote
 
TRANSCRIPT