Janet & Walter Sondheim Art Prize

The Janet & Walter Sondheim Art Prize Winner: Abigail Lucien

BOPA proudly announces the winner of the 18th annual Janet & Walter Sondheim Art Prize. Please join us in congratulating Abigail Lucien as the recipient of the $30,000 prize. Lucien is a Haitian American interdisciplinary artist who works in sculpture, literature, and time-based media. Their practice addresses themes of (be)longing, futurity, myth, and place by considering our relationship to inherited colonial structures and systems of belief/care.

The Sondheim Art Prize is designed to assist in furthering the careers of visual artists living and working in the greater Baltimore region. “Since 2006, the Sondheim Art Prize has awarded over $400,000 to 16 artists to advance their careers, providing key funds to move their studio practice to the next level,” explains Lou Joseph, BOPA’s Prizes and Competitions Manager.

“Additionally, over $250,000 has been awarded to over 100 finalists, along with the opportunity to exhibit artwork in nationally and internationally respected art museums like the Walters [Art Museum]. More than just a monetary award, the Sondheim Art Prize allows BOPA to elevate and celebrate the great artists in the Baltimore region, by providing a genuinely exciting program that continues to grow with the addition of the Civitella Ranieri residency in Italy and the studio residency at the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower.

Janet & Walter Sondheim Art Prize Juror

Kelly Baum — Kelly Baum is the John and Mary Pappajohn Director of the Des Moines Art Center. Previously, she served for almost eight years as the Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Curator of Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has worked as a scholar and curator for almost twenty-five years. Before arriving at The Met, she held positions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin, and the Princeton University Art Museum, where she established the institution’s first department of modern and contemporary art. She has published widely and curated or co-curated dozens of exhibitions, including Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason, 1950-1980; Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, 1963-2017; Wangechi Mutu: The NewOnes, will free Us; Alice Neel: People Come First; Charles Ray: Figure Ground; and Hew Locke: Gilt. She received her PhD from the University of Delaware in 2005 and was a 2018 fellow in the Center for Curatorial Leadership.

Devin Morris — Devin N. Morris is a Baltimore born, Brooklyn based artist. Morris was recently in The Aesthetics of Matter, the first NYC curatorial project by Deux Femme Noires: Mickalene Thomas and Racquel Chevremont. He was also featured in the New Museum’s MOTHA and Chris E. Vargas’ Consciousness Razing — The Stonewall Re-Memorialization Project, and the two-person show, Inside Out, Here, at La Mama Gallery, curated by Eric Booker (Studio Museum, Exhibition Coordinator). Morris is the founder of 3 Dot Zine, which is an annual

publication that serves as a forum for marginalized concerns and recently hosted the Brown Paper Zine & Small Press Fair with the Studio Museum in Harlem and created a site-specific installation at the MoMA PS1 2018 NY Art Book Fair. His 2017 solo show at Terrault Contemporary was listed in Artforum as the “Best of 2017,” and he was named by Time Magazine in 2017 as one of “12 African American Photographers You Should Follow.”

Ingrid Schaffner — Curator at Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Prior, she was the curator of 2018 Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania from 2000–2015. Schaffner work often coalesces around themes of archiving and collecting, photography, feminism, and alternate modernisms — especially surrealism. She has curated important exhibitions that have helped studio craft to gain acceptance as fine arts, such as Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay with Jenelle Porter at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia in 2009. Schaffner co-authored the publication Deep Storage which was a major international survey of 50 contemporary artists representing issues and images of collecting, storage, and archiving. Other exhibitions include Pictures, Patents, Monkeys, More … on collecting, Richard Tuttle, In Parts, 1998–2001, and The Photogenic: Photography Through its Metaphor. She has also penned numerous publications on 20th-century art, art reviews in Artforum, and catalog essays.