About Our Honorees
Carolee Schneemann
Carolee Schneemann, multidisciplinary artist. Transformed the definition of art, especially discourse on the body, sexuality, and gender. The history of her work is characterized by research into archaic visual traditions, pleasure wrested from suppressive taboos, the body of the artist in dynamic relationship with the social body.
Painting, photography, performance art and installation works shown at Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and most recently in a retrospective at the Dorsky Museum in New Paltz entitled “Within and Beyond the Premises”. Film and video retrospectives Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Film Theatre, London; Whitney Museum, NY; San Francisco Cinematheque; Anthology Film Archives, NYC.
She has taught at many institutions including New York University, California Institute of the Arts, Bard College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Elizabeth Merena
Elizabeth worked
at the New York State Council on the Arts from July, 1986 until September,
2011. She was first hired as a program associate in the Individual Artists
Program and then, in 1991, became director of the Visual Arts Program.
She travelled to all corners of the state assisting non-profit arts organizations
and artists with their efforts to produce, present and create contemporary
visual art, media and film. In 2000 she instigated the founding of The
New York State Artists Workspace Consortium (NYSAWC), a project committed
to making professional artistic workplaces, such as Women's
Studio Workshop, more visible to other funding sources. This effort resulted
in three publications detailing best practices for both artists and organizations
interested in advancing the creative process.
During the development of NYSAWC, efforts to preserve, present and protect the archival heritage of the "alternative" or "avant-garde" movements in the U.S. were deemed hugely important and given a focus through another project, the Art Spaces Archive Project (AS-AP). This effort, initiated by Elizabeth and developed in conjunction with a national steering committee, resulted in a complex online resource and research system that is now managed and maintained by Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies.
Elizabeth has contributed reviews on film, media and photography to MultiCultural Review, Afterimage and Film Library Quarterly. She has presented at conferences and panels always emphasizing the important cultural contributions made by living artists. In an era that predated degrees in arts administration, she was told that she got her first job in the field because she could "correctly load transparencies into a slide projector, run a 16mm film projector and alphabetize". She is making successful attempts to stay up on today's technology.