The Contemporary Austin is pleased to announce the Suzanne Deal Booth Art Prize, a biennial, unrestricted award of $100,000 to be given to an artist selected every two years, which will also include a solo exhibition and scholarly publication. An independent advisory committee comprising renowned curators and art historians will select the recipient.

The Suzanne Deal Booth Art Prize is funded by a generous gift to the museum by arts professional and museum trustee Suzanne Deal Booth and administered by The Contemporary Austin. In addition to the award, the prize funds a solo exhibition for the recipient, along with an accompanying publication and related public programming at The Contemporary Austin. The exhibition will be on view at the museum’s downtown venue, the Jones Center, with the option to also be shown at the museum’s outdoor site, the Betty and Edward Marcus Sculpture Park at Laguna Gloria.

"The prize will create highly visible outlets for an artist to present newly conceived work to audiences from Central Texas and around the world,” said Louis Grachos, Ernest and Sarah Butler CEO and Director of the Contemporary Austin. “I know our esteemed panel of advisors will select an inaugural recipient who is deserving of increased recognition and for whom the award, exhibition, and publication will be transformative—whether they be an early-, mid-, or late-career artist."

In addition to Suzanne Deal Booth and Heather Pesanti, the museum’s Senior Curator, the Prize’s inaugural advisory committee includes Stephanie Barron, Senior Curator and Head of Modern Art Department, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Naomi Beckwith, Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Peter Eleey, Chief Curator, MoMA PS1; Hamza Walker, Executive Director, LAXART; and Heidi Zuckerman, Nancy and Bob Magoon CEO and Director, Aspen Art Museum.

The Suzanne Deal Booth Art Prize will not include a formal application process. The winner will be selected by the independent advisory committee made up of renowned curators and art historians. Advisory committee members will each nominate artists that they identify based on their own experience, expertise, and knowledge of artists working all over the world. The full committee will then vote to select the recipient from among the artists nominated.

The winner of the Suzanne Deal Booth Art Prize will be announced in fall 2016, with the exhibition to open in early 2018.

About Suzanne Deal Booth

Suzanne Deal Booth has long been committed to the recognition, preservation, and conservation of visual arts and cultural heritage. Booth co-founded the Friends of Heritage Preservation and has served as director since its inception in 1998.

Deal Booth is a Master of Arts in art history and conservation from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and Conservation Center in New York City. While at Rice and NYU, she had the opportunity to work directly under the tutelage of art patron and humanist Dominique de Menil. She worked with her close friend, the artist James Turrell, on Skyspace at MoMA PS1 (1986), and later assisted on his retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2012, under Deal Booth’s patronage, Turrell’s permanent installation at Rice University, Twilight Epiphany, was realized. She has worked at several institutions, including les Monuments Historiques, France; Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth; the Menil Collection, Houston; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the J. Paul Getty Trust, Los Angeles.

Her patronage and philanthropic efforts include serving on the boards of several arts organizations, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Menil Collection, the Centre Pompidou Foundation, Ballroom Marfa, and The Contemporary Austin. Additionally she established the Booth Scholar in Residence at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies and the Booth Family Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, both in Rome, Italy.

Suzanne Deal Booth Art Prize Advisory Committee

Advisory Committee (Left to Right): Stephanie Barron, Naomi Beckwith, Peter Eleey, Heather Pesanti, Hamza Walker, Heidi Zuckerman

Stephanie Barron
Senior Curator and Head of Modern Art Department, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Stephanie Barron is Senior Curator and Modern Art Department Head at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Among her groundbreaking exhibitions and publications over the past forty years are The Russian Avant-Garde, 1910-1930: New Perspectives; German Expressionist Sculpture; Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany; Exiles + Émigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900–2000, and exhibitions of David Hockney, Ed Kienholz, Ken Price, Maria Nordman, Sharon Lockhart, and Alexander Calder, several of which featured installations designed by Frank Gehry. She has been responsible as well for Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images with installation by John Baldessari, Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures, New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919-1933, and in 2016 the retrospective of John McLaughlin. She was responsible for the Museum’s acquisition of the Janice and Henri Lazarof Collection of modern art which premiered at LACMA in 2008. Ms. Barron has been decorated twice by the German government, receiving the Order of Merit, First Class and the Commander’s Cross. Her exhibitions and publications have five times been voted the best in the United States by the International Art Critics Association and three times by the Art Museum Curators Association, and she has twice received the College Art Association’s distinguished Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for best museum catalogue. Ms. Barron has lectured widely in the United States, published on a variety of subjects, served on several national, state, and city professional peer panels, and chaired the domestic Federal Indemnity Program for six years. She is a long standing member of the Art Advisory Panel of the IRS, and was elected a fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a trustee of the John Baldessari and Mike Kelley Foundations. Ms. Barron was educated at Barnard College and Columbia University.

Naomi Beckwith
Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

Naomi Beckwith is the Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Since she joined the MCA in 2011, she has organized numerous highly acclaimed exhibitions including the group show The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now in 2015; Homebodies in 2013, and Color Bind: The MCA Collection in Black and White in 2012. She also organized several monographic shows, with the artists Keren Cytter (2015), Leslie Hewitt (2014), William J. O’Brien (2013), and Jimmy Robert (2012); and an outdoor plaza project with Yinka Shonibare (2014). In June of this year, Beckwith opened an exhibition featuring The Propeller Group, an artist collective from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Prior to the MCA, Beckwith was Associate Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem and held multiple fellowships, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. She is on the Board at Art Table and was a guest curator for El Museo del Barrio biennial last year.

Peter Eleey
Chief Curator, MoMA PS1

Peter Eleey is the Chief Curator of MoMA PS1. Since joining the museum in 2010, Eleey has organized or co-organized more than 20 exhibitions, including acclaimed surveys of emerging and established artists such as Huma Bhabha, James Lee Byars, Simon Denny, Lara Favaretto, Mike Kelley, Maria Lassnig, Sturtevant and Henry Taylor; as well as debut exhibitions of Ed Atkins, Darren Bader, Matt Connors, and Esther Kläs. He has also organized large topical group exhibitions that have engaged subjects including surveillance, the September 11 terrorist attacks, and nostalgia in an evolving New York City, leading the curatorial team for the most recent edition of Greater New York. Eleey is currently co-organizing a major survey of Mark Leckey’s work that will open in October. Prior to MoMA PS1, he was Visual Arts Curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and served as a curator and producer at Creative Time, the pioneering presenter of public art in New York.

Heather Pesanti
Senior Curator, The Contemporary Austin

As Senior Curator of The Contemporary Austin, Heather Pesanti has organized monographic exhibitions of Marianne Vitale, Do Ho Suh, and Robert Therrien, with forthcoming projects by Monika Sosnowska, John Bock, and Wangechi Mutu. In 2015, she organized the museum’s largest exhibition to date, Strange Pilgrims, a fourteen-artist, thematic exhibition on experiential art that engaged three venues and a catalogue in conjunction with the University of Texas Press. In 2014, Pesanti was paired with artist and critic Robert Storr as joint visiting critics in the prestigious Viewpoint speaker series at the University of Texas at Austin. Pesanti has also been guest curator for Artpace’s International Artist-in-Residence program in San Antonio, Texas, in 2011, and Scotiabank Nuit Blanche in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in 2014. Prior to Austin, Pesanti lived in Buffalo, New York, where she was Curator at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery for five years. During her tenure, she organized the seminal historic exhibition Wish You Were Here: The Buffalo Avant-garde in the 1970s, a large-scale survey of Buffalo’s dynamic arts scene in the 1970s (2012). Additional projects included Robert Therrien (2013), DECADE: Contemporary Collecting: 2002–2012 (2012; co-curated), Surveyor (2011), Beyond/In Western New York: Alternating Currents (2010; co-curated), Bad Habits (2009), and a series of Artists in Depth exhibitions from the collection. She was also adjunct professor in the Visual Studies Department at the University at Buffalo. Pesanti earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and holds graduate degrees from the University of Oxford, England, and New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.

Hamza Walker
Executive Director, LAXART

Hamza Walker is the Executive Director of LAXART, an independent nonprofit art space in Los Angeles presenting experimental exhibitions and public art initiatives. From 1994–2016, he was the Director of Education and Associate Curator at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, a non-collecting museum devoted to contemporary art. In 2016 he co-curated (with Aram Moshayedi) Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum, and in 2015 he curated A Painting is a Painting isn’t a Painting at the Kadist Foundation in San Francisco. Recent projects at the Renaissance Society include Wadada Leo Smith, Ankhrasmation: The Language Scores 1967–2015, which he co-curated with John Corbett and two thematic group exhibitions, Teen Paranormal Romance (2014) and Suicide Narcissus (2013). He has contributed reviews and art criticism to numerous monographs and magazines including Parkett and Artforum. He is the recipient of the 1999 Norton Curatorial Grant and the 2004 Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement. In 2010 he was awarded the Ordway Prize for contributions to the field in the form of writing and exhibitions.

Heidi Zuckerman
Nancy and Bob Magoon CEO and Director, Aspen Art Museum

Heidi Zuckerman is the Aspen Art Museum’s Nancy and Bob Magoon CEO and Director, overseeing all aspects of the AAM’s guiding vision and mission, administrative policies, curatorial and educational practices, strategic planning, and fundraising efforts. During her ten-year tenure with the AAM, she has secured a budget surplus every year—reinvesting instead of drawing from the endowment; fostered a 270+% increase in operational budget ($1.9M to $7M); and overseen the successful strategic planning and capital and endowment fundraising of over $75M for the construction of the AAM’s Shigeru Ban–designed facility, which opened to the public in 2014.

From 2004 to 2005, Zuckerman served as the Chair of the Art Curatorial Department at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and from 1999 to 2005, as the institution’s Phyllis Wattis MATRIX Curator. Prior to this, Zuckerman served as the Assistant Curator of 20th-Century Art at the Jewish Museum in New York. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in European History from the University of Pennsylvania; a Diploma from the Royal Society of Art, Christie’s, London; as well as a Master of Arts degree in Art History from CUNY Hunter College. She also serves as the Art Network Chair for the Young Presidents’ Organization globally.