The Rappaport Prize
2004 Rappaport Prize Winner Debra Olin
The Rappaport Prize is a collaborative initiative of the Jerome Lyle Rappaport Charitable Foundation and the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park. It is an annual award of $25,000 made to a contemporary American artist.
The Prize is foremost an investment in both an individual and the broader community. For the artist it reflects recognition of his/her abilities, talent, and future promise. For the community it reflects the importance of art to encourage the value of creativity within the region.
Founded and funded by the Jerome Lyle Rappaport Foundation, the Rappaport Prize follows the Foundation’s mission of promoting leadership in public policy, medical research, and art. “Our greatest hope with the Rappaport Prize is to stimulate and advance artistic energy and expression,” stated Foundation Chairperson, Phyllis Rappaport.
Administered by the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, the Rappaport Prize fulfills the DeCordova’s mission of presenting significant artists while educating the public about developments in contemporary American art.
The Criteria
2003 Rappaport Prize Winner John Bisbee
Specifically, the Prize is established to foster two goals:
- Recognize the achievement and potential of an artist who has already demonstrated significant creativity and vision.
- Encourage the artist to continue in a career of art making.
The Selected Artist Will:
- Produce artwork of exceptional quality
- Demonstrate excellence and leadership in their chosen practice
- Engage with 21st century aesthetic issues which have had a significant impact on contemporary visual art
- Support DeCordova’s focus on contemporary American art, particularly of New England artists
All media are considered and the Museum does not discriminate based on age, financial status, reputation, race, sexual orientation, or gender.
The Process for Selecting the Prize Winner
Rappaport Foundation Founder Jerry Rappaport and Chair Phyllis Rappaport flank María Magdalena Campos-Pons (center), the 2007 Rappaport Prize winner.
The Curatorial Staff of DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park select candidates for consideration and also invite ten art professionals to serve as nominators for the Rappaport Prize. Each of these nominators recommends two artists for consideration. After reviewing the artists’ materials and possible studio visits, the DeCordova’s Museum Director and Curators select the Prize winner.
Applications are not accepted for the Prize.
The Prize winner gifts a work of art to the Museum’s Permanent Collection. This acquisition helps build the artist’s prominence and makes their work accessible to the museum-going community.
Rappaport Prize Winners include:
2000 Jennifer Hall (interactive media)
2001 Annee Spileos Scott (multimedia installations)
2002 Lars-Erik Fisk (sculpture)
2003 John Bisbee (sculpture)
2004 Debra Olin (prints and printed constructions)
2005 Sarah Walker (painting)
2006 Abelardo Morell (photography)
2007 María Magdalena Campos-Pons (multi-media)
For more information about the Jerome Lyle Rappaport Charitable Foundation, visit: www.rappaportcharitablefoundation.com
Jennifer Hall: 2000 Rappaport Prize Winner
Jennifer Hall is an artist who has been working with interactive media for over twenty-five years. She is among this country’s foremost leaders in the filed of art-and-technology—as an artist, educator, curator, and researcher. Since the late 1970s, Hall has used newly emerging technologies to push the aesthetic envelops of sculpture, video, performance art, sound are, and interactive installations. Hall is also experienced in the research and production of media related information design, and is engaged in the re-focusing of biological material as an art medium.
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Annee Spileos Scott: 2001 Rappaport Prize Winner
For two decades, Annee Spileos Scott has been creating multimedia installations with sociopolitical content. Initially, her work explored women’s identities in a patriarchal society. More recently, the artist has focused on family dysfunction, substance abuse, ethnic cleansing, organized religion, mental health, and healing. Her installations are notable for their use of found objects that mock suburban coordinated decor.
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Lars-Erik Fisk: 2002 Rappaport Prize Winner
Since 1995, Lars-Erik Fisk has been turning out artworks in the form of a sphere, a shape he calls a "basic form, one that we can all understand, but is at the same time the least likely form for these subjects to assume. In combining the dissimilar, I want to find how we might recognize something by seeing it for what it is not." Using whatever organic and manmade materials are required to produce the traditional construction upon which a particular form is based, Fisk compacts the salient functional and distinctive features of the original into a concise and humorous ball in order to render it universally accessible. With great success, Fisk has managed to capture the essential formal qualities of such immediately recognizable twentieth-century icons as a UPS truck, a school bus, and a Volkswagen—and reduce them to a spherical essence.
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John Bisbee: 2003 Rappaport Prize Winner
John Bisbee’s sculptures express his energy and restlessness, as well as his bravura in choosing to work with an unforgiving and potentially dangerous material. For some time now he has worked with nails and spikes, transforming their industrial toughness and sharp points into an amazing array of abstract forms that can be loosely organic or tightly geometric, or both at the same time. Using twelve-inch spikes as his building material, Bisbee welds the spikes into units and assembles them in shapes that are suggestive without being specific, and that embody a number of opposing characteristics. The forms can look hard or soft, organic or industrial, highly crafted or sloppily thrown together (although they’re not), delicate or strong, complex or simple.
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Debra Olin: 2004 Rappaport Prize Winner
Debra Olin’s work explores her own heritage while making connections between disparate cultures, searching for links through history, rituals, and folklore.
Debra Olin focuses on bodily coverings as containers for meaning. In both her two-dimensional prints and three-dimensional printed constructions, Olin creates garments, or images of garments, adorned with text, found objects, and images from the natural world and of her Jewish cultural heritage—notably Yiddish literature, poetry, and folklore. These elements gird the body and make reference to what the artist considers to be the constructive elements of identity, nature, religion, family, memory, ritual, history, self-perception, and morality. Olin’s work, taken as a whole, can also be considered as an autobiographical narrative, a revelation of self broken down into its constituent parts while bound together within the framework of apparel.
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Sarah Walker: 2005 Rappaport Prize Winner
Sarah Walker creates compositionally clear—yet dazzlingly complex—works that reference the cosmos and the ever-collapsing new conceptions of physical, mental, and virtual space. Walker belongs to a new generation of artists who link their vision and practice with newly understood realities of the twenty-first century: genetic mapping and engineering, neurobiology, quantum mechanics, fractal geometry, information theory, and the virtual realms of the computer and the Internet. Her paintings consist of a central and vertical undulating feature set against broad modulated horizontal passages, or against a monochrome ground. Shot through all of this are multiple arrays of smaller images, usually nested or linked sets of quasi-geometric nodes or shattered planar areas. The viewer seems confronted by a space marked by a dizzying instability. The discrete elements of the painting seem to move, rapidly throbbing and bolting and fluttering every which way at once, as if active slices of much larger continua.
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Rappaport Foundation Chair Phyllis Rappaport and Founder Jerry Rappaport stand with Abelardo Morell (center), the 2006 Rappaport Prize winner.
Abelardo Morell: 2006 Rappaport Prize Winner
Since the mid-1980s, Abelardo Morell has been involved with a type of conceptual photography where he creates images exploring the myriad forms of perception. Whether looking at the world from the viewpoint of a child, or focusing on the most mundane objects from a new vantage point, Morell’s photographs transform objects in the everyday world and make us think long and hard about what we are seeing.
His series of camera obscura photographs break new ground. Although the principle of the camera obscura—the optical model for the modern camera—has been known since antiquity, Morell began to use the technique in new ways to create mysterious and evocative layerings of exterior and interior spaces. Morell’s inventiveness is apparent with each new project that he tackles.
In 1999, this important traveling survey exhibition, Abelardo Morell and The Camera Eye, was locally exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. There are currently five monographs about Abelardo Morell in print, including the most recent and comprehensive book, Abelardo Morell, published by Phaidon Press in 2006. In addition, Abe’s photographs have been included in numerous group exhibitions nationally and internationally with accompanying publications, and his work has been the subject of many articles and reviews.
Abelardo Morell, Blurry Upright Camera Obscura Image of Santa Maria della Salute with Scaffolding in Palazzo Bedroom, 2007; Gift of the Artist in recognition of The Rappaport Prize
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María Magdalena Campos-Pons: 2007 Rappaport Prize Winner
The work of internationally recognized artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s has been exhibited in galleries, museums, and in biennials around the world. In her many-layered bodies of work she has used photography, painting, sculpture, video, film, installation, and performance to investigate issues of identity, displacement, autobiography, matriarchy, domestic labor, race, femininity, memory, and acculturation. Campos-Pons uses aspects of personal and collective memories to reflect on her own heritage as a woman of Nigerian descent, now exiled from Cuba and living as a black woman in North America.
Born in 1959 in Matanzas, Cuba, Campos-Pons studied art in Cuba and did graduate work at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. She moved to the United States in 1991 and now teaches at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and is the co-founder of Gasp (Gallery Artists Studio Projects), an alternative exhibition space in Brookline, MA.
Internationally celebrated artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s multimedia works have been exhibited in the United States, Canada, Japan, Norway, France, Italy, Africa, and Cuba. She was represented in the Venice, Johannesburg, and Dakar Biennials, and most recently was the subject of a mid-career survey, María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Everything Is Separated by Water, organized by the Indianapolis Museum of Art and exhibited there in the first part of 2007. A smaller version of this exhibition will travel to the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach and was on view from September 21, 2007 – November 11, 2007. In the near future, Campos-Pons will present a performance/lecture at the Tate Modern in London in October 2007 on the subject, “Why Sculpture? Why Here?” This event is organized by the Henry Moore Institute with the Institute of International Visual Artists (inlVA).
She is most widely known for her presentations in two major group exhibitions: Unpacking Europe at the Museum Boijmans Van Beunigen in Rotterdam in 2002 and Authentic/Ex-centric: Conceptualism in Contemporary African Art, part of the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001. Campos-Pons's art can be found in the collections of the: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Chicago; the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; among other institutions.
Campos-Pons’s large-scale Polaroid photographs were included in DeCordova’s 2004 exhibition, Self-Evidence: Identity in Contemporary Art.
