Subdivision
| • | 501. Creative Artists | [X] |
| | 41 | Name: | Professor Tracy K. Smith | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2023 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 501. Creative Artists | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1972 | | | | |
| 42 | Name: | Mr. Frank Stella | | | Year Elected: | 1999 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 501. Creative Artists | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1936 | | | Death Date: | May 4, 2024 | | | | | | |
One of the most significant abstract painters of the last fifty years, Frank Stella is an important figure in minimalism, post-painterly abstraction and offset lithography (a technique he devised). After studying history at Princeton University, he began work in 1958 on a series of strikingly sombre and intelligent paintings known as the black paintings. The Museum of Modern Art recognized the power of these paintings, which addressed themselves simultaneously to the empirical limitations of the flat space of paintings and the temporal extent of human life. Soon after this work was recognized with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, his restrained style was unleashed in a series of paintings that broke open the pictorial surface, appearing now as large 3-dimensional planes of aluminum. Painted in bright colors, these paintings launched a novel investigation of pictorial space that was uniquely recognized by a second retrospective. In 1983, in recognition of Stella's interest in aesthetic theory, he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard. In recent years he has taken on large-scale projects for public spaces and has received architectural commissions. He was presented with the John Singleton Copley Award in 2012 and the National Artists Award of the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in 2015. | |
| 43 | Name: | Mr. Isaac Stern | | | Institution: | Carnegie Hall | | | Year Elected: | 1995 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 501. Creative Artists | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1920 | | | Death Date: | September 22, 2001 | | | | |
| 44 | Name: | Ms. Twyla Tharp | | | Institution: | Twyla Tharp Dance | | | Year Elected: | 2015 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 501. Creative Artists | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1941 | | | | | | |
Since graduating from Barnard College in 1963, Ms. Tharp has choreographed more than one hundred sixty works: one hundred twenty-nine dances, twelve television specials, six Hollywood movies, four full-length ballets, four Broadway shows and two figure skating routines. She received one Tony Award, two Emmy Awards, nineteen honorary doctorates, the Vietnam Veterans of America President's Award, the 2004 National Medal of the Arts, the 2008 Jerome Robbins Prize, and a 2008 Kennedy Center Honor. Her many grants include the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1965, Ms. Tharp founded her dance company, Twyla Tharp Dance. Her dances are known for creativity, wit and technical precision coupled with a streetwise nonchalance. By combining different forms of movement - such as jazz, ballet, boxing and inventions of her own making - Ms. Tharp’s work expands the boundaries of ballet and modern dance. In addition to choreographing for her own company, she has created dances for The Joffrey Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, The Paris Opera Ballet, The Royal Ballet, New York City Ballet, The Boston Ballet, The Australian Ballet, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, The Martha Graham Dance Company, Miami City Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Atlanta Ballet and Royal Winnipeg Ballet. Today, ballet and dance companies around the world continue to perform Ms. Tharp’s works.
In 1992, Ms. Tharp published her autobiography PUSH COMES TO SHOVE. She went on to write THE CREATIVE HABIT: Learn it and Use it for Life, followed by THE
COLLABORATIVE HABIT: Life Lessons for Working Together.
Today, Ms. Tharp continues to create. | |
| 45 | Name: | Professor Natasha Trethewey | | | Institution: | Northwestern University | | | Year Elected: | 2022 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 501. Creative Artists | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1966 | | | | | | |
Natasha Trethewey currently serves as the Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University. She was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 2012 and again in 2013. She earned her B.A. from the University of Georgia in 1989, her M.A. from Hollins University in 1991, and her M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1995.
Trethewey is an exceptional poet and writer. Her works focus on problematic episodes in the American South and, more particularly, the Gulf Coast - and in her own family history. Thus, the themes of her poetry - ordinary lives in the Jim Crow South, Black soldiers in the Civil War, the life of a New Orleans sex worker, the devastation left by Hurricane Katrina, and, most recently, the difficult life and traumatic death of her mother, which led Trethewey to become a poet. During her appointment as Poet Laureate, Trethewey created a section of the PBS NewsHour, "Where Poetry Lives." As one critic has written, "A sense of justice made urgent by loss continues to underpin her work, which entwines historical narrative and lived experience, refusing to diminish either. Her poetry speaks plain truth rendered in forms strong enough to hold contradictions and sometimes devastating complexities."
Trethewey's bibliography includes: Domestic Work (2000), Bellocq's Ophelia (2002), Native Guard (2006), Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010), Thrall (2012), Monument: Poems New and Selected (2018), and Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir (2020). Among numerous awards, she was the 2003 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2007 recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the 2017 recipient of the Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities, and the 2018 recipient of the Sidney Lanier Prize for Southern Literature. She has been a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Letters since 2019, and was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2022. | |
| 46 | Name: | Ms. Kara Walker | | | Institution: | Rutgers University | | | Year Elected: | 2018 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 501. Creative Artists | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1969 | | | | | | |
New York-based artist Kara Walker is best known for her candid investigation of race, gender, sexuality, and violence through silhouetted figures that have appeared in numerous exhibitions worldwide.
Born in Stockton, California in 1969, Walker was raised in Atlanta, Georgia from the age of 13. She studied at the Atlanta College of Art (BFA, 1991) and the Rhode Island School of Design (MFA, 1994). She is the recipient of many awards, notably the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award in 1997 and the United States Artists, Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship in 2008. In 2012, Walker became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work can be found in museums and public collections throughout the United States and Europe including The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Tate Gallery, London; and the Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo (MAXXI), Rome.
Walker’s major survey exhibition, Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, was organized by The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis where it premiered in February 2007 before traveling to ARC/ Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris; The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; and the Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth. Recent solo exhibitions have been presented the Art Institute of Chicago (2013); Camden Arts Centre in London (2013); Metropolitan Arts Center (MAC) in Belfast (2014), The Cleveland Museum of Art (2016), and DESTE Foundation Project Space in Hydra, Greece (2017).
In February 2018, on the closing weekend of Prospect New Orleans art triennial, Walker premiered The Katastwóf Karavan, a wagon-mounted thirty-eight note steam calliope that plays songs associated with the history of African-American protest and celebration in styles ranging from traditional spirituals to jazz to funk. Sited on Algiers Point where slaves entering New Orleans were held before transport across the river to be sold, the work gave shape and voice to those who suffered through the great Catastrophe that was the result of the institution of Slavery.
During the spring of 2014, Walker’s first large scale public project, a monumental installation entitled A Subtlety: Or the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, was on view at the abandoned Domino Sugar refinery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Commissioned and presented by Creative Time, the project - a massive sugar covered sphinx-like sculpture - responded to and reflected on troubled history of sugar. The installation was seen by over 130,000 visitors over the course of 9 weekends that the exhibition was open to the public and received an overwhelming critical response. For this project, Walker was also awarded the 2015 Brendan Gill Prize, presented by the The Municipal Art Society of New York "for a work of art that embodies the spirit of New York City."
Kara Walker currently lives and works in New York City and is the Tepper Chair in the Visual Arts at Rutgers University Mason Gross School of the Arts. | |
| 47 | Name: | Ms. Rosanna Warren | | | Institution: | Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago | | | Year Elected: | 2015 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 501. Creative Artists | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1953 | | | | | | |
Rosanna Warren is the Hanna Holborn Gray Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Her book of criticism, Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry, came out in 2008. Her most recent books of poems are Departure (2003) and Ghost in a Red Hat (2011). In 2020 she wrote Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters. She is the recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, The American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Lila Wallace Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New England Poetry Club, among others. She was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. | |
| 48 | Name: | Professor John Edgar Wideman | | | Institution: | Brown University | | | Year Elected: | 2005 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 501. Creative Artists | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1941 | | | | | | |
The author of twenty novels, over fifty short stories and numerous essays on literary theory and criticism, John Wideman received the 1996 James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical writing. He is a two-time winner of the PEN-Faulkner Award (the only person to have done so twice) for his books Philadelphia Fire (1990) and Sent for You Yesterday (1983). His story "Weight" received the 2000 O. Henry Award for best short story, and the essay "Whose War" was included in The Best American Essays of 2003. His other prizes include a Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Grant, the Rea Prize for short fiction, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Lannan Literary Award for fiction, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences' Katherine Anne Porter Award in Literature. Mr. Wideman is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and has served on the faculties of the University of Pennsylvania (1967-74), the University of Wyoming (1974-86), the University of Massachusetts (1986-2004) and Brown University (2004-), where he is Asa Messer Professor and Professor of Africana Studies and English. A graduate of Oxford University's New College (B.Ph., 1966), he was the second African American to receive a Rhodes Scholarship. His novel, Fanon (2008), is a part fictional, part biographical account tracing the life, message and legacy of Martiniquean revolutionary Frantz Fanon. He recently published a collection of short stories called American Histories (2018). | |
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