Martha Rosler is the first recipient of The 100K Prize, a biennial award presented to an influential US-based woman artist. Rosler will receive a 100,000 USD unrestricted cash award from The New Foundation Seattle (TNFS), complemented by a full year of exhibitions and public programs in Seattle.
The City of Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle Public Library, University of Washington School of Art + Art History + Design, and others will present talks, workshops, and exhibitions in collaboration with the Foundation in 2016. Programming details will be announced in January.
Rosler has said, “I am honored and delighted to be the first recipient of The 100K Prize from The New Foundation Seattle, an award instituted in recognition of women artists whose work has shown a commitment to social justice. It is especially gratifying that this generous prize seeks to support artists like me, who are trying to think through the role of art in the activation of communities, and that this is reflected in the year-long programming dedicated to opening social questions to broad publics in different locales around the city.”
Rosler works across a range of media, including photography, video, writing, performance, sculpture, and installation, often addressing matters of the public sphere and everyday life, especially as they affect women. Rosler has for many years produced works on war and the “national security climate,” connecting everyday experiences at home with the conduct of war abroad—most famously in House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, originally made as a response to the war in Vietnam in the late 1960s and reprised in 2004-2008 as a new series on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rosler has had numerous solo exhibitions at museums and galleries internationally and has published over 15 books of art and cultural criticism, most recently Culture Class (2012), on artists and gentrification. In 2012, she presented her performance installation Meta-Monumental Garage Sale at MoMA, New York. If You Lived Here…, her ground-breaking three-exhibition cycle on homelessness, housing, and the built environment, which she organized at the Dia Art Foundation in New York in 1989, is regarded as a touchstone exhibition on these themes. Versions of this exhibition cycle have circulated in various forms over the past 25 years in the US and abroad, most recently at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and at the Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna in 2015. It is the basis for programming at The New Foundation Seattle in 2016.
TNFS Founder Shari D. Behnke said, “I have wanted to create a nationally-based prize for a long time, and I have wanted to create a prize for women artists for equally as long. I have supported artists in Seattle and the Northwest for 20 years, and it seemed fitting to start a prize on the national stage as the concept of regionalism has blurred. Additionally, The 100K Prize, as The New Foundation Seattle has developed it, is more than just giving the artist money. It is bringing the ideas of one artist to Seattle for an extended period of time. It is a way for the people who are living and working in Seattle to immerse themselves in a body of work created by one artist.”
“Martha Rosler was a clear choice for the first 100K Prize,” said TNFS Founding Director Yoko Ott. “She is an influential artist and a keen social commentator who has shown an enduring commitment to her practice of provoking conversation on the issues that affect us all. Her civically engaged work helped inspire the strategy behind the Prize’s accompanying public programming. As the lead organizer, The New Foundation Seattle is bringing together Seattle-based institutions, agencies, and organizations to present her work and ideas in depth. Our community partnerships help us invest in a breadth of programming that couldn’t be achieved otherwise.”
