Hamptons-based painter and sculptor Audrey Flack is one of four women in the arts slated to receive the 2017 Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award in February in New York City. The other 2017 Lifetime Achievement honorees are Spelman College President Mary Schmidt Campbell, PhD; video artist, photographer and writer Martha Rosler; and artist and activist Charlene Teters.
Kat Griefen, an art dealer and art historian, will receive the 2017 President’s Award for Art & Activism.
All five women will be honored on Saturday, February 18, 2017 at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT). A ticketed cocktail reception from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. will be followed at 8 p.m. by the LTA Awards Ceremony, which is free and open to the public. The cocktail reception will include three food stations, passed hors d’oeuvres, an open bar and a chance to meet the honorees. Tickets are $150, available online at nationalwca.org.
Doors will open at 7:30 p.m. for the awards ceremony, which runs from 8 to 9:30 p.m.
First presented in 1979 in President Jimmy Carter’s Oval Office to Isabel Bishop, Selma Burke, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson and Georgia O’Keeffe, the WCA Lifetime Achievement Awards were the first to recognize the contributions of women to the arts and their profound effect on society. Today, the Awards continue to honor women, their work, their vision and their commitment.
Audrey Flack’s involvement with the organization’s Lifetime Achievement Awards dates back to her nomination of another Hamptons based artist, Lee Krasner, who received the award in 1980, according to Flack.
Known for her photorealist paintings and representational sculpture, Audrey Flack has had her art shown in such renowned institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. A pioneer in the male-dominated field of photorealism, in 1966 Flack was the first photorealist to have work acquired by MoMA and one of the first women to be included—along with Mary Cassatt—in the seminal art history textbook, H.W. Janson’s “History of Art.”
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Audrey Flack. Courtesy of the artist.
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In her monumental sculpture, Flack has worked to change the representation of women in art, presenting them as strong, intelligent, purposeful individuals rather than “mere sex objects gazing up at a general on a horse,” according to a release from the WCA.
Audrey Flack was one of the artists included in the Heckscher Art Museum’s “You Go Girl! Celebrating Women Artists” exhibition, which was reviewed by Hamptons Art Hub here. In addition to making visual art, Flack also plays the banjo. She created a bluegrass band that at one time featured two other Hamptons based artists Connie Fox and William King both on the fiddle.
Flack will have a solo exhibition of her drawings in the spring at New York’s Hollis Taggart Galleries in Chelsea. The exhibition, “Master Drawings: From Crivelli to Pollock,” will be on view from April 20 through May 26, 2017.
“Art has been the central organizing force of my life,” Flack wrote in an email. “I am honored to have been selected for this award and to stand among other artists I greatly respect.”
Mary Schmidt Campbell, PhD, an art historian and former curator, was appointed vice chair of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities in 2009. Dr. Campbell, a former dean for NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, is the current president of Spelman College, a historically black liberal arts college for women in Atlanta, Georgia.
In video, photography, text, installation and performance, Martha Rosler creates work that focuses on such topics as everyday life and the media, and architecture and the built environment, especially with a view as to how women are affected. Her writing has been published in Artforum, e-flux journal and Texte zur Kunst.
A citizen of the Spokane Nation, Charlene Teters is an artist, writer, educator and activist, and the Academic Dean of the college at the Institute of American Indian Arts,. She has exhibited internationally and given keynote addresses. Teters is a founding board member of the National Coalition on Racism in Sports and the Media, according to her website.
Kat Griefen, an art dealer and art historian, is the co-owner of Accola Griefen, which focuses on modern and contemporary art by American women artists and feminist artists of historical significance. She was previously the director of A.I.R. Gallery, the first non-profit gallery for women artists in the U.S., from 2006 to 2011. Griefen, a senior lecturer at Rutgers University, is also on the board for the Feminist Art Project.
The New York Institute of Technology is located at 1871 Broadway at 61st Street, New York, 10023.
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