Monday, May 19, 2014, 6:30pm
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Family Courtyard
465 Huntington Avenue
Boston
Since the late 1990s, contemporary artist Sarah Sze has created a signature artistic style, building detailed installations from the minutiae of everyday life. Her architectural, site-specific sculptures seem to come alive and play with the viewers’ perception of their exhibition spaces—and the works themselves. The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (SMFA), is proud to honor Sze with the Medal Award at a gala event on May 19, chaired by SMFA Trustee Carol Noble. First presented in 1996, SMFA’s Medal Award annually recognizes noteworthy artists and influential art patrons for their commitment to and influence on the art world.
Sarah Sze’s sculptures explore the ever-growing accumulation of objects and information in today’s society, questioning both their value and meaning. She employs a constellation of techniques and everyday materials in her work—from found objects and photographs to handmade sculptures and living plants—to create landscapes that penetrate walls and transform spaces through radical shifts of scale or the colonization of overlooked areas. Like the instruments of measurement they often reference, Sze attempts to quantify and organize the universe, ascribing a fragile, personal system of order. Within her practice, sculpture becomes both a device for organizing and dismantling information, and a mechanism to locate and dislocate oneself in time and space.
“We are pleased to welcome and honor Boston native Sarah Sze as the recipient of this year’s Medal Award,” says SMFA President Christopher Bratton. “The School’s annual Medal Award not only recognizes important contemporary artists, such as Sarah, but the gala and silent auction help support SMFA scholarships and programs that have an extraordinary, lasting impact on the success of these young artists.”
Born in Boston in 1969, Sze presently lives and works in New York. She received a BA from Yale in 1991 and an MFA from New York’s School of Visual Arts in 1997. She was a 2005 Radcliffe Institute Fellow and a 2003 MacArthur Fellow. In 2013, Sze represented the United States at the 55th Venice Biennale with a solo pavilion presentation titled Triple Point.
The Medal Award, endowed through the generosity of the Haynes Family Foundation, has been awarded to Alex Katz, Kiki Smith, Ellsworth Kelly, Ellen Gallagher and Julian Schnabel, among others. Tickets are still available. Visit www.smfa.edu/medal2014 or call T +1 617 369 3591 for more information.
About SMFA
Founded in 1876 and accredited by the National Association of Schools of Art and Design, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (SMFA), is one of only two art schools in the country affiliated with a major museum—the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
