AICA International 48th Congress, AICA Honorary Award to Sarah Wilson
London, October 26-29, 2015
At AICA International’s Congress in London, on the initiative of the Secretariat and supported by the Awards Commission, the association will present art historian, critic and curator, Sarah Wilson with the AICA Honorary Award for Distinguished Contribution to Art Criticism. Professor Wilson is awarded for her contribution to scholarship and criticism, as well as for her advancement of transcultural intellectual exchange, a founding ideal of AICA.
President of the Association, Dr Marek Bartelik, notes: ‘Professor Sarah Wilson’s contribution to an international, interdisciplinary perspective is exceptional. She has written about many international artists, published in many languages, often after making research visits to remote places around the world”. Adriana Almada, Vice president of AICA and Chair of the Awards Commission, stresses “the importance of Sarah Wilson’s work in unveiling artistic practices from under represented areas of the world.” Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton, Secretary General AICA and President AICAUK says: ‘I am pleased that Sarah Wilson, a long serving member of the British section of AICA, has been recognised by this AICA Award for her outstanding work and for her support and promotion of artists and criticism internationally’. Saleem Arif Quadri MBE will present the Award during the General Assembly of AICA International at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, at 6pm Thursday 29 October. The Award ceremony will be followed by a drinks reception.
Dr Sarah Wilson: Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Courtauld Institute in London, was educated at Oxford and at the Courtauld where she joined the faculty in 1982. She has also taught in France at the Sorbonne and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. The work of her students now constitutes a unique English language archive in post-1945 European and Soviet/Russian art. Many alumni now hold prominent positions in museums and galleries in Britain and abroad. She has curated exhibitions, the most significant being Paris, Capital of the Arts,1900-1968, (Royal Academy in London, Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao) and Pierre Klossowski and the Vicious Circle (Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 2006; Cologne and Paris). In 2014 she was appointed to the curatorial team of the 1st Asian Biennale /Fifth Guangzhou Triennale (China-Guangzhou). Her major publications include The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations, 2010 and Picasso/Marx and socialist realism in France, 2013. In the last two years she has published critical essays on Sheila Hicks, Niki de Saint Phalle, Judit Riegl, Germaine Richier, Amrita Sher-Gil, and the rediscovered; André Fougeron, Jacques Monory, Yinka Shonibare, and for the World Goes Pop catalogue (Tate Modern). Essays on Władysław Hasior, Jan Marussich and on Saleem Arif Quadri for the Guangzhou Triennale are forthcoming.
AICA (International Association of Art Critics) was established by UNESCO in 1949 to promote independent art criticism around the world. AICA has a membership of near 5000 art critics in 63 national sections around the world and an Open Section. AICA is well represented in Europe, Australia, North and South America and has a growing presence in Middle Eastern and Asian countries and in Africa.
AICA’s Awards for Distinguished Contribution to Art Criticism were established in 2011 and presented in the country hosting the AICA Annual Congress. Previous recipients are Ticio Escobar (Paraguay 2011, his bilingual book The Invention of Distance is published by AICA and distributed by Ridinghouse), Annemarie Monteil (Switzerland 2012), Thomas Strauss (Slovakia 2013) and Lee Yil (South Korea 2014).
