HAMZA WALKER AND ARTUR ŻMIJEWSKI WIN $100,000 ORDWAY PRIZE
Creative Link for the Arts and the New Museum have announced Hamza Walker, the director of education and associate curator at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, and Polish artist Artur Żmijewski, as the recipients of the Ordway Prize. An international panel of nominators and a jury of leading arts-world figures—led by Jennifer McSweeney, director of Creative Link for the Arts, and Richard Flood, chief curator at the New Museum—selected the Ordway Prize recipients from a global pool of nominees. Walker and Żmijewski will each receive an unrestricted cash prize of one hundred thousand dollars.
Artur Zmijewski was born in 1966 in Warsaw, where he currently lives and works. Most recently, Żmijewski presented a selection of works for the Museum of Modern Art’s “Projects 91” series. His latest film, Sculpture Plein-air. Swiecie 2009, which premiered as part of “Projects 91,” records one of a series of staged workshops organized and documented by the artist in which the participants are invited to create art.
In 2008, Żmijewski showed Oko za Oko (An Eye for an Eye) in the New Museum’s “After Nature” exhibition. In 2007–2008, he was a DAAD Artist in Residence in Berlin. Żmijewski participated in Documenta 12 in 2007 and Manifesta 4 in 2002. In 2005, his film Repetition was shown in the Polish pavilion at the fiftieth Venice Biennale. In 2000, he was given the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Per L’Arte Prize for Oko za Oko.
Hamza Walker was born in 1966 in New York City and lives in Chicago. In addition to his position at the Renaissance Society, he is also on the faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has written for Trans, New Art Examiner, Parkett, and Artforum and penned catalogue essays on Darren Almond, Rebecca Morris, Giovanni Anselmo, Thomas Hirschhorn, Moshekwa Langa, and Katharina Grosse. He has served on numerous panels locally and internationally and is the recipient of the 1999 Norton Curatorial Grant and the 2005 Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement.
Nominees for the Ordway Prize are midcareer talents between the ages of forty and sixty-five, with a developed body of work extending over a minimum of fifteen years. Past Ordway Prize recipients have included curator/arts writer Ralph Rugoff and artist Doris Salcedo (2006), and curator/arts writer James Elaine and artist Cildo Meireles (2008).
