This year’s fellowship awards from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation were presented to a total of 24 artists working in the field of Fine Arts; 14 artists in the category of Film-Video; 11 in Photography. The Fine Arts fellows include seven diverse painters, all women: Leigh Behnke, Cora Cohen, Harriet Korman, Carrie Moyer, Ann Pibal, Susan Wanklyn, and Elena Sisto. Cohen and Korman have been active since the 1960s. Cohen, known for her large-scale, dense and washy, mixed-media oil paintings, also received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award in 2012. The Responsibility of Forms, an exhibition of her new paintings was recently at Guided By Invoices in New York, reviewed in these pages by David Rhodes.  Sisto, a long-time teacher at the School of Visual Arts, opens an exhibition of new work on April 25, titled Between Silver Light and Orange Shadow, at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, her first show with that gallery.  She describes her recent paintings as “centering around the artist’s experience of being in the studio, and the passage into adulthood of young women artists.”

Philip Kennicott chief art critic for The Washington Post, has received the Pulitzer Prize in the category of criticism this year for two long-format reviews of exhibitions, and one personal essay, all written in 2012. The three highlighted articles are: a critical analysis of the photography of Taryn Simon at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, a review of an exhibition at the National Building Museum devoted to the architect Kevin Roche, and an essay, titled “What Are We Losing in the Web’s Images of Suffering and Schadenfreude?” that examines our relationship to the over-abundance of disturbing and grotesque imagery found online and in-print. Kennicott, a finalist for last year’s Pulitzer, has been a critic for the Post since 1999.

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Criticism is one of fourteen Pulitzers awarded in journalism.  There are separate prizes in the arts (letters, drama and music).  It is relatively rare for the criticism’s laurels to go to an art critic.  Although Holland Cotter of the New York Times picked up the prize in 2009, the previous and only other time the award went to an art critic was Emily Genauer’s win in 1974.  In recent years Michael Kimmelman and Jerry Saltz have been listed as finalists.  The Pulitzer Prize dates back to 1917 but the criticism category was instituted in 1970.

Smee’s citation reads: “For his vivid and exuberant writing about art, often bringing great works to life with love and appreciation.”  He joined to Boston Globe in May 2008, replacing Ken Johnson who returned to the New York Times after his brief tenure at the Globe.  Formerly critic for The Australian, Smee was based for a number of years in London where he wrote for The Daily Telegraph and for art publications such as Modern Painters and The Art Newspaper.  He is the author of books and catalog essays devoted to Lucian Freud.

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