FRANK STELLA, MAYA LIN AMONG WINNERS OF THE NATIONAL MEDAL OF THE ARTS

Winners of the National Medal of the Arts were announced in an afternoon ceremony on Thursday and awarded their medals by Barack and Michelle Obama, reports the New York Times’s Dave Itzkoff. The list includes the artist Frank Stella, the designer Milton Glaser, the artist and architect Maya Lin, the singer and actor Rita Moreno, the soprano Jessye Norman, the musician Bob Dylan, the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, the composer and conductor John Williams, the actor and director Clint Eastwood, and Joseph P. Riley Jr., the mayor of Charleston, South Carolina. The Oberlin Conservatory of Music and the School of American Ballet were awarded medals as well.

The annual award is managed by the National Endowment for the Arts. In a statement, the endowment’s chairman, Rocco Landesman, said the winners represented “the breadth and depth of American architecture, design, film, music, performance, theater, and visual art.”

Citations for the humanities were bestowed at the same ceremony, with Philippe de Montbello, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; historian Robert A. Caro; and author Elie Wiesel, founding chairman of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, among the honorees.