2011 recipients
The Herb Alpert Foundation and California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) announce the five recipients of the 2011 Alpert Award in the Arts: choreographer Jess Curtis in the Dance category; filmmaker Natalia Almada in Film/Video; Nicole Mitchell, composer/performer in Music; for the Theatre prize, writer and performer Marc Bamuthi Joseph, and, in Visual Arts, artist Emily Jacir.
Alpert Award in the Arts
Every year, five three-member panels of noted artists and arts professionals, in Dance, Film/Video, Music, Theatre and Visual Arts, each select one recipient. Alpert Award Director Irene Borger describes this year's decisions:
“The Alpert Award Dance panel is honoring Jess Curtis for his profound and provocative investigation of the body, and the ways he viscerally transmits corporeal experience with a strong, unique sense of imagery, timing and rhythm, mesmerizing dream logic, inventiveness, and magnetic, singular depth.
Natalia Almada was chosen by the Alpert Award Film/Video panel as a gifted storyteller and artist, pushing against the strictures of nonfiction film, telling nuanced, complex stories, and gracefully drawing our attention to the overlooked narratives in today’s challenging landscapes of immigration reform, border issues and human rights.
The Alpert Award Music panel selected Nicole Mitchell for her brilliant playing, the maturity of her conception, and the ways she courageously break forms; they were moved by her dedication, as a deeply ethical member of the musical community, and the way she consistently opens up new spaces in the universe.
Marc Bamuthi Joseph is being recognized by the Theatre panel for the force and expansiveness of his vital, cosmopolitan vision, the originality of his forms, which acknowledge the “breaks” between identities, ideas, and realities as a space for discovery and power, and the way he continues to synthesize art, activism, education and autobiography into a single extraordinary quest.
The Visual Arts panel has named Emily Jacir as this year’s Alpert Award recipient for, through an economy of means, beauty and poetic vision, creating incisive and aesthetically engaging work that bravely raises important questions, in this historic moment of social transition, without presuming to come up with answers.”
Now in its 17th year, the annual Alpert Award in the Arts provides five unrestricted $75,000 grants to artists working in the fields of dance, film/video, music, theater and visual art.
The prize rewards creative experimenters who are challenging art, their respective disciplines, and society. The awards also provide vital financial support to each artist at a key juncture in his or her creative development.
Initiated and funded by The Herb Alpert Foundation, the awards have been administered by CalArts, which was selected by the foundation based on a shared vision of the transformative power of the arts.
