The $50,000 Bennett Prize is Back for Its Third Edition – RisePEI

For any artist, attaining a prize in artwork is the very best type of approbation, an excellent honor in addition to a improbable profession increase. As a sensible matter, nonetheless, the latter is extra consequential; but such awards—whether or not nationwide in scope (the Turner Prize), corporate-branded (the Hugo Boss Prize), or privately funded (the Bucksbaum Award)—are typically given to artists who, rising or not, are identified in important, curatorial and collector circles, and thus are already on observe for potential art-world success.

On this respect, the $50,000 Bennett Prize, a biennial open-call, juried competitors, is uncommon, as a result of it’s aimed toward artists—particularly, ladies painters—laboring in obscurity. Explaining the rationale for the award, Steven Alan Bennett, who, alongside along with his spouse, Dr. Elaine Melotti Schmidt, inaugurated the Bennett Prize in 2018 with a $3 million endowment to the Pittsburgh Basis (which administrates the proceedings), says: “The downward strain of ‘massive artwork’ on ladies artists was fairly palpable. And we may see exceptionally proficient artists who have been possible by no means going to acquire recognition. So, we determined to create a prize that will showcase ladies painters who, no matter their age or expertise, had not but achieved full skilled recognition.”

Submissions for the 2023 Bennett Prize—which for the primary time features a second-place award of $10,000—are being accepted till Oct. 7. The competitors isn’t open to hobbyists, to college students, or to artists whose work has beforehand bought for $25,000 or extra or who’ve obtained an award or honorarium in that quantity. The award is distributed as two stipends of $25,000 every, paid out in as a few years. Ten finalists will probably be chosen to take part in a touring exhibition organized by the Muskegon Museum of Artwork (MMA) in Muskegon, Michigan, and the winner will probably be showcased in a solo exhibition on the shut of her grant. The opening exhibition will probably be held from Might 18 to Sept. 10, 2023, on the MMA earlier than touring to further venues.

Moreover, the Bennett Prize’s necessities embrace a matter of fashion, because the competitors is restricted to artists whose follow revolves round “figurative realism.” This stipulation is the Prize’s different raison d’être, as Bennett and Schmidt are collectors and supporters of ladies painters who produce such work—sponsoring, for instance, a present at Seattle’s Frye Museum of works by Los Angeles artist Christina Quarles, which is on view till June 5.

The truth is, Quarles’s work, which contain compositions of our bodies stretched like Foolish Putty, actually illustrate simply how elastically the Prize defines figurative realism. “We interpret each ideas, figurative and actual, liberally,” says Schmidt. Explains Bennett, “We aren’t essentially searching for your grandmother’s realism.” Each agree that their definition of figurative realism does permit for parts of abstraction, although to what diploma is a matter of interpretation. Schmidt cites the portraits finished by Elaine de Kooning and Alice Neel as examples of what would fulfill their standards, whereas Bennett provides, “If Chuck Shut had been a lady, his work would match, too.” However in the end all of it boils all the way down to subjectivity. “What’s figurative and what’s actual is just about within the eye of the beholder,” Bennett says. “If what seems in a piece is clearly a human determine, that’s in all probability adequate—and the one purpose I say ‘in all probability’ is as a result of every jury has its personal imaginative and prescient, and the jury adjustments from one competitors to the subsequent.”

Certainly, the competitors so far has evinced an eclectic vary of approaches to the style. Ayana Ross, the recipient of the 2021 Bennett Prize, explores the intersecting problems with race, gender, id and economics by way of depictions of day by day life in African American communities, utilizing conventional oil portray strategies to unconventional ends. Painterly depictions of her topics (a school-age woman in a vivid, blue-and-white striped gown, seated at her classroom desk; a younger boy pensively propped half on, half off a blue bicycle) are set in opposition to elaborate backdrops of prints, patterns and ornamental designs that function visible subtexts.

“Solar with Seaside Ball,” Oil, acrylic and flashe on linen, 2018 30” x 24” by 2019 Bennett Prize finalist, Kira Nam GreeneAneka Ingold, winner of the inaugural Bennett Prize in 2019, takes a distinct tack in each fashion and substance by using combined media on paper, usually on a big scale. Her figures are tightly rendered—extra drawn than painted—to dramatically graphic impact. They’re usually posed amidst objects surreally intruding upon pictorial areas that modify from flat to abstractly illusionistic. In impact, Ingold’s works are, very similar to Frida Kahlo’s, allegories of feminine expertise that heart on her personal.

Chloe Chiasson, a Bennett Prize 2 finalist, provides one more interpretation of figurative realism. She creates formed canvases wherein components of her imagery stick up from the floor or bulge out from the perimeters in a approach that appears to push her depictions of largely younger, androgynous fashions—posing in cowboy hats, denims or different western fashions—past the body of her compositions. Bridging the hole separating sculpture from portray, Chiasson’s works occupy an ambiguous, “in-between” house that’s neither totally two-dimensional nor three-dimensional—a liminal state that echoes the evident gender fluidity of her topics.

If Bennett and Schmidt began the Prize as a way of surfacing these artists, their success has benefited not simply the competitors’s winners, however its finalists as effectively. “We’re seeing increasingly more folks and establishments—galleries, museums and collectors—embracing the ladies who’ve been acknowledged by the Prize,” Schmidt says. She additional provides that their assist for the members doesn’t cease with handing them cash. “Over the two-year interval between every competitors, we actively promote the artists, each in print and on-line, so that each one acquire recognition for his or her work.”

The achievements of artists ensuing from their involvement with the Bennett Prize are quite a few. For example, Bennett mentions Pittsburgh artist Su Su, a 2021 finalist. “Her work is now within the de la Cruz Assortment in Miami, and he or she gave a lecture there in the course of the 2021 version of Artwork Basel Miami.” Sylvia Maier, one other finalist who obtained an honorable point out from the 2019 Bennett Prize, had a one-woman exhibition at Miami’s Malin Gallery, which ran concurrently with that truthful. In the meantime, one other 2019 finalist, Carrie Pearce, had a present on the Dubuque Museum of Artwork in 2020.

The Bennett Prize has undoubtedly been instrumental in elevating the profiles of those artists, altering their fortunes within the discount. As 2021 Prize recipient Ross places it, “The Bennett Prize gave me unbelievable visibility that has catapulted my profession. I’ve bought extra paintings—at increased worth—than ever earlier than and may actually focus [on being] a full-time artist.”

Click on here to study extra about The Bennett Prize, present finalists, and entry necessities.