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[caption id="attachment_49351" align="alignleft" width="200"] Gideon Mendel. Crispin Hughes photo.[/caption]
Charles C. Bergman, chairman and CEO of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, announced this week the establishment of a new award, the Pollock Prize for Creativity, honoring an outstanding artist whose work embodies high creative standards and exemplifies the impact of art on individuals and society. Given on a yearly basis, the Pollock Prize carries a cash award of $50,000 and the recognition of the organization safeguarding the artistic legacies of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner.
The recipient of the inaugural Pollock Prize for Creativity is photographer Gideon Mendel. Born in Johannesburg in 1959, Mr. Mendel first came to prominence as a “struggle photographer” during the final years of apartheid. After moving to London in the early 1990s, he expanded the range of his subject matter to include the lives of people with HIV/AIDS in Africa and elsewhere in collections such as “A Broken Landscape” and “Framing AIDS.” His work has also explored the effects of climate change in “Drowning World.” In his ongoing project, “Through Positive Eyes,” he has served not as a photographer but an enabler, handing the camera to people living with HIV so they can show their own reality. His work has been exhibited in numerous gallery and museum shows and published in magazines including National Geographic, Rolling Stone, L’Express, Stern, The Sunday Times Magazine and The Guardian Weekend Magazine. Among the honors he has previously received are the Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography and the Amnesty International Media Award for Photojournalism. The exhibition “Drowning World: Gideon Mendel” will be presented May 13 - October 16, 2016, at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University. He is represented by Axis Gallery in New York.
[caption id="attachment_49350" align="aligncenter" width="660"]
Gideon Mendel, Jeff and Tracey Waters, Staines-upon-Thames, Surrey, UK (February 2014), 122 by 122 cm, Lightjet C Type photographic print on Fuji Crystal Archive Paper.[/caption]
“As the Pollock-Krasner Foundation celebrates its 30th anniversary, we are proud to expand on our record of service by inaugurating the Pollock Prize for Creativity,” Mr. Bergman stated. “It is a natural extension of our mission to provide financial assistance to individual artists of established ability, which we have done by making more than 4,100 grants to date in 77 countries, for a total of more than $65 million.”
The new prize is an extension of the existing Lee Krasner Award, given to an older artist in recognition of a lifetime of achievement. The Pollock Prize, by contrast, will lend support to outstanding artists who may be in mid-career, and whose ongoing work has a social and cultural dimension. The Prize will be awarded to an artist working in one of the disciplines the Pollock-Krasner Foundation supports—painting, sculpture, works on paper and printmaking, or photography. As with the Lee Krasner Award, there is no application for the Pollock Prize, which is given by a Foundation jury based on the recommendations of a network of nominators.
“It’s a huge honor to receive this award named after Jackson Pollock, an artist I’ve always loved for his freedom in breaking barriers,” said Mr. Mendel. “Because my own work increasingly straddles the border between art, documentation and activism, it’s all the more important to me that the prize is given not for photography but for creativity in general. For the past nine years, the Drowning World project has been an all-consuming labor of love—an incredibly complex and expensive labor. I am deeply grateful to the Pollock-Krasner Foundation for recognizing the project through this prize, which will help me immeasurably in bringing Drowning World to completion.”
on Mar 21, 2016