Francis J. Greenburger Awards

Five under-recognized artists of extraordinary merit are recognized in this bi-annual event. Presented by Art Omi, the Francis J. Greenburger Award is an unrestricted $12,500 prize that honors established artists whom the art world knows to be of extraordinary merit but who have not been fully recognized by the public. Francis J. Greenburger, the Founder and Chairman of Art Omi, has invited a renowned artist, gallerist, writer, museum professional, and collector to each select one recipient whom they believe to fulfill the mission of the award. Mr. Greenburger established the awards in 1986 after a conversation with his friends, André Emmerich and Clement Greenberg during which André said, “The best and brightest artist of each generation are known, but not to everyone. Ask the inner circle and they can tell you.” This statement is the inspiration and founding principle of the Francis J. Greenburger Awards.

The 2025 awards, totaling $62,500, will be presented at The Morgan Library & Museum on Tuesday, September 9 from 6–8 PM. The ceremony is free and open to the public with RSVP required. Dinner with artists and presenters immediately following the ceremony with ticket purchase required.

2025 Artists

Janine Antoni (b. 1964, Freeport, Bahamas) received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She is known for her unusual processes, which employ her body as both a tool and a source of meaning within the conceptual framework of her practice. Her early methods involved transforming unique materials such as chocolate and soap through habitual, everyday processes such as eating and bathing, respectively. In her work, Antoni carefully articulates her relationship to the world, giving rise to emotional states that are felt in and through the senses. In each piece, no matter the medium or image, a conveyed physicality is meant to speak directly to the viewer’s body.

Antoni has exhibited at the Hayward Gallery, London; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Magasin 3 Handelshögskolan, Stockholm; the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Sammlung Goetz, Munich; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among other major institutions. She has been represented in international festivals including the Gwangju, Istanbul, Johannesburg, Kochi-Muziris, SITE Santa Fe, Venice, and Whitney Biennials; Documenta 14, Kassel, Germany; and Project 1, New Orleans. In 2016, Antoni collaborated with choreographers Anna Halprin and Stephen Petronio on the exhibition Ally at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia. Antoni collaborated again with Halprin in 2019, on Paper Dance, an exhibition at the Contemporary Austin, in Texas. That same year Antoni presented a commissioned solo show in the catacombs at the Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, titled I am fertile ground. In 2024 her solo show In my holding was presented at Rossi & Rossi, Hong Kong. Most recently, she installed her first public artwork commissioned by the City of Coral Gables, located on Miracle Mile, Florida.

Her work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Antoni is the recipient of prestigious honors including a Larry Aldrich Foundation Award, an Anonymous Was A Woman grant, an Artes Mundi / Wales International Visual Art Prize nomination, a Creative Capital grant, the Glen Dimplex / Irish Museum of Modern Art Artists Award, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship, a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur fellowship, and a Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant.

Robert Mangold (b. 1937, North Tonawanda, New York) has, since the 1950s, explored line and color on supports ranging in shape, size, and dimension. Committed to abstraction as a means of communication, he has worked within a consistent geometric vocabulary to produce a varied body of paintings and works on paper. His career has developed through an evolution of techniques for the application of paint onto his chosen surface—first plywood and Masonite, and later, beginning in 1968, stretched canvas. He moved away from the conventions of painting and introduced shaped canvases, working with symmetrical and asymmetrical forms as well as curvilinear edges. For his early shaped and multipanel constructions, Mangold airbrushed oil-based pigments in gradations of color, and later used a roller before ultimately adopting a brush to apply acrylic in subtle hues that approach transparency. He remained intrigued by color as much as structure, and his relationship with it has shifted throughout the decades. His initial palette, inspired by industrial objects—file cabinets, brick walls, and trucks—transitioned toward colors that evoke mood: warm ochres, light blues, deep oranges, olive greens, and other hues. Mangold’s mostly monochromatic compositions show an attention to gesture with the addition of hand-drawn pencil lines that curve across the planes of color. 

Among his numerous honors and accolades, Mangold was awarded the Skowhegan Medal for Painting from the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and the Alexej von Jawlensky Prize, associated with the Museum Wiesbaden, Germany. He became a trustee of the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, in 1999, and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001. He was inducted into the National Academy of Design in 2004. Mangold’s work is held in more than eighty public collections in the United States and abroad, including the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; the Menil Collection, Houston; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Tate, London; and the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum.

Renée Stout (b. 1958, Junction City, Kansas) grew up in Pittsburgh and received her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, where she majored in painting. Upon moving to Washington, D.C., in 1985, she began to explore the connections between African and African American art and spirituality, which led her to focus more on mixed media sculpture. She was the first American artist to exhibit in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art. 

Stout draws inspiration from current social and political events, the African diaspora, everyday urban life, and the immaterial world. Her objects and paintings often emerge from her decades of research into the art history and traditions of Hoodoo, which has evolved from African roots through American slavery to the present. Small, handmade sculptures are an essential part of Stout’s practice. These fabricated, machine-like objects and assemblages are meant to connect to an otherworldly realm and powers. More broadly, they represent the hopes that faiths around the world seek to fulfill, universal desires for survival, health, love, and happiness.

Stout's work has recently been exhibited at the African American Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York; and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the National Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; the Saint Louis Art Museum; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; and many other institutions.

Stout is the recipient of numerous awards, among them grants from the Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation, the Virginia A. Groot Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. She has been honored with the Anonymous Was A Woman Award and the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award.

Leslie Wayne (b. 1953, Landstühl, Germany) grew up in Los Angeles, in a home devoted to the arts and music. Encouraged to pursue painting, she attended the University of California’s College of Creative Studies, Santa Barbara, where she developed a correspondence with the French photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue. Inspired by this exchange, she moved to Paris for a year, and then for five years to Israel, where she cultivated a love of plein-air landscape painting. She moved to New York in 1982 to finish her degree, earning her BFA with honors from Parsons School of Design. Keen to engage in the prevailing discourse of the New York art world, she abandoned landscape painting for abstraction and developed her signature material process. Wayne became an early member of 55 Mercer, one of the first artist-run SoHo cooperative galleries. In 1992, after her second solo show there, she joined the Jack Shainman Gallery, where she is still represented. 

Today Wayne’s work lies at the intersection of abstraction and representation. While she is best known for her abstract paintings inspired by the California landscape of her youth, her recent return to landscape painting, this time aerial, conjures deep questions about territory, the American West, and Manifest Destiny. 

Wayne has received grants and fellowships from Artists Space, the Buhl Foundation, Change, Inc., the Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and Yaddo. In 2017 she was awarded an MTA Arts & Design commission for public artwork at the Bay Parkway Station in Brooklyn, New York. 

Wayne has exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad, and her work is in numerous collections, including the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven; the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; the Colección Jumex; the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Massachusetts; the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Library, New York; the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris; the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami; the National Academy of Design, New York; the Neuberger Museum of Art, Harrison, New York; the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York; the Portland Museum of Art, Maine; and the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska. 

Wayne is an occasional curator and writer. Her reviews and interviews have been published in BOMB, artcritical, and Two Coats of Paint. In 2017 she was inducted into the National Academy of Design, where she currently serves as vice chair of the board. She lives and works in New York City.

Nina Yankowitz (b. 1946, Newark, New Jersey) creates artworks that blur boundaries associated with painting, sculpture, and craft. Through radical approaches, her multimedia installations have probed the material, political, and sonic nature of abstract art. Early in her career, she was a resident at the artists’ collective Group 212 in Woodstock, New York, where she collaborated with a musician on audio for her draped painting Oh Say Can You See.

Yankowitz studied at Temple University and the New School for Social Research before graduating from the School of Visual Arts. She presented significant work in 1969 and 1971 at New York City’s Kornblee Gallery. The Draped Paintings, unstretched canvases sprayed with mists of acrylic paint, offered abstract, atmospheric expanses of color and were installed with folds extending vertically down or horizontally across the wall. Her Pleated Paintings were made with running lengths of canvas sprayed with paint, then pressed by pleating machines. The subsequent Dilated Grain Readings are synesthetic experiences using color as visual sound notations for viewers to read on canvas or linen surfaces. Yankowitz’s early work was the subject of a 2022 solo exhibition, Nina Yankowitz Paintings, 1960s–70s, at the Eric Firestone Gallery in New York. In 1973 the artist participated in the inaugural Whitney Biennial. During the mid-1970s Yankowitz joined other women in a collective to research how to help women struggling with identity and equal representation in the workplace; the collective later issued Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics. 

In the 1970s Yankowitz began visiting the East End of Long Island. Her experience of the natural environment, specifically the sounds of birds and insects, influenced her work in sound/art. She currently continues to work in the East End and New York City. 

She has had solo exhibitions or been included in group shows at the Art Institute of Chicago; Guild Hall, East Hampton, New York; the Kunsthaus, Hamburg, Germany; the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut; MoMA PS1, Queens, New York; the MuseumsQuartier, Vienna; and the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York. Her work is in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Franklin Furnace/MoMA Artists’ Books Vertical Files Collection; Guild Hall, East Hampton, New York; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; and the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, Richmond.

The retrospective Nina Yankowitz: In the Out / Out the In opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida, in 2025 and travels to the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York. She has taught at the School of Visual Arts and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has been a visiting instructor at universities across the country. In 2024 she was inducted into the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame.

2025 Presenters

Susan and Michael Hort began collecting in 1985 and quickly amassed one of the most important contemporary art collections of the past fifty years, with a focus on collecting in depth and supporting young artists. They bought the first painting John Currin ever sold, for example, and the first three works that Adrian Ghenie sold. Art from their collection is loaned to museums around the world; twelve works by Nicole Eisenman, for instance, were recently on loan to the Whitechapel Gallery in London, the Museum Brandhorst in Munich, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, as part of the artist’s traveling retrospective. Seven works by Katherine Bradford from their collection were on view in her recent exhibition at HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark in Graz, Austria. In the course of a year, thousands of art professionals visit the Horts’ collection, in addition to many museum groups.

In 1995 the Hort family and their friends established the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, in honor of the Horts’ daughter Rema, who died of cancer that year. The foundation has two grant programs. Throughout the year, the Peter Hort Quality of Life Cancer Grant, in honor of the Horts’ son Peter, who died in 2022, brings family members and loved ones together in order to provide much-needed companionship and support while a patient is undergoing treatment.

The Emerging Artist Award reflects the Foundation’s commitment to fostering visual artists early in their careers who demonstrate profound dedication to their creative practices. To date, the Foundation has awarded more than $9 million in grants.

Over five decades, Martin Puryear has generated a body of work that defies categorization, creating sculpture that examines identity, culture, and history. Departing from the impersonal and machined aesthetic of Minimalism (the dominant sculptural movement of the artist’s formative years), Puryear’s work combines modernist abstraction with methods of traditional production inspired by trades and crafts. With shapes informed by the natural world and by ordinary objects, and made by direct engagement with materials such as wood, wire, tar, bronze, cast iron, steel, and granite, his work is quiet but deliberately associative, inspired by his extensive travels and his endless curiosity about the world, and drawing on a huge and varied reserve of images and ideas.

Puryear has said: “If I were forced to describe my work I would say I’m interested in making sculpture that tries to describe itself to the world, work that acknowledges its maker and that offers an experience that’s probably more tactile and sensate than strictly cerebral.”* 

Martin Puryear (b. 1941) was born in Washington, D.C. His first one-person exhibition was in 1968, and since then he has exhibited throughout the world and realized public commissions in Europe, Asia, and the United States. His work was featured in Documenta IX, and in 1989 he represented the United States at the Bienal de São Paulo, where he was awarded the festival’s Grand Prize. In 2007 the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized a survey of his work, which traveled to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. In 2015 the Art Institute of Chicago organized an exhibition of fifty years of his works on paper, which traveled to the Morgan Library & Museum in New York and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington. Puryear received a MacArthur Foundation award in 1989 and a National Medal of Arts from President Obama in 2011. In 2019 the artist represented the United States at the 58th Venice Biennale.

*Martin Puryear, interviewed by Richard J. Powell, quoted in Martin Puryear, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 106. 

Dr. Mónica Ramírez-Montagut has been the executive director of the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York, since 2022. She has served on the National Museum and Library Services Board and currently serves on the New York State Council on the Arts. A member of the Association of Art Museum Directors, she is a frequent collaborator with government agencies such as the Federal Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions, which nominates representatives to the Venice Biennale, and the National Endowment for the Arts; she also advises philanthropic foundations and local arts organizations.

Before joining the Parrish, Ramírez-Montagut was the executive director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University and, earlier, director of the Newcomb Art Museum at Tulane University. She has held curatorial positions at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; the San Jose Museum of Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and other leading institutions.

Ramírez-Montagut earned her master’s and doctorate degrees from the Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB) at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, and her bachelor’s degree from the Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City.

Jack Shainman cofounded the Jack Shainman Gallery with Claude Simard in 1984 in Washington, D.C. Soon after, the gallery relocated to Manhattan; it found a home in the East Village before moving to SoHo and then, in 1997, to its current location in Chelsea. In 2013 the gallery added two exhibition spaces, one on West Twenty-Fourth Street, since closed, and the other a 30,000-square-foot former high school in Kinderhook, New York known as The School. In 2025 the gallery opened a flagship location in Tribeca, in the landmarked Clocktower Building at 46 Lafayette Street.

The mission of the gallery for more than forty years has been to champion artists from around the world and across a diversity of media. A particular focus is on artwork that is conceptually rigorous and often politically inclined while remaining aesthetically engaging.

Gallery artists are included in numerous public collections worldwide, among them the British Museum, the Tate Modern, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges-Pompidou, Paris; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

An artist, critic, and curator, Robert Storr received a BA from Swarthmore College and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. From 1990 to 2002, he was curator and then senior curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where he organized thematic exhibitions such as Dislocations and Modern Art Despite Modernism, and single-artist shows on Max Beckmann, Elizabeth Murray, Gerhard Richter, Robert Ryman, and Tony Smith. Storr coordinated the Projects series from 1990 to 2000, mounting exhibitions with Ann Hamilton, Art Spiegelman, and Franz West, among others. 

In 2002, he was named the first Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Storr has also taught at the CUNY Graduate Center and the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies, as well as Harvard University, the New York Studio School, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University. He has been a frequent lecturer in this country and abroad. 

A contributing editor at Art in America since 1981, Storr writes frequently for Artforum, Parkett, Art Press (Paris), Frieze (London), and Corriere della Sera (Milan). He is the author of numerous catalogs, articles, and books, including Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting, Chuck Close (with Lisa Lyons), and Intimate Geometries: The Work and Life of Louise Bourgeois. 

Among his many recognitions are a Penny McCall Foundation grant for painting, a Norton Family Foundation curator grant; honorary doctorates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Maine College of Art & Design; awards from the U.S. chapter of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA-USA); an AICA award for distinguished art criticism; an Independent Curators International Agnes Gund Curatorial Award; and from the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art, the Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for excellence in American art history. In 2000 the French Ministry of Culture named him a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres; it later elevated him to Officier in the same order. From 2005 to 2007, Storr was visual arts director of the Venice Biennale, the first American invited to assume that position. He was appointed professor of painting and printmaking and dean of the Yale School of Art in 2006 and served as dean until 2016.

2022 Artists

Luis Camnitzer born in Germany in 1937, is a Uruguayan artist and writer who moved to New York in 1964. He was at the vanguard of 1960s conceptualism, engaged principally in printmaking, sculpture, and installations. Camnitzer’s artwork explores subjects such as pedagogical norms, repression under systems of power, and the deconstruction of familiar frameworks. His humorous, biting, often politically charged use of language in art has distinguished his practice for more than four decades.

Born in Oklahoma, Anita Fields is a contemporary Native American multidisciplinary artist of Osage heritage. She is known for her works that combine clay and textile with Osage knowledge systems. Fields explores the intricacies of cultural influences at the intersections of balance and chaos found within our existence. Her sculptures have been featured in many solo and group exhibitions, including Weaving History into Art: The Enduring Legacy of Shan Goshorn at the Gilcrease Museum,Tulsa (2021); Form and Relation: Contemporary Native Ceramics at the Hood Museum, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire (2020); Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (2019); and Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas (2018–2019). She was included in Who Stole the Teepee? at the National Museum of the American Indian, New York (2000–2001), and Pottery by American Indian Women: The Legacy of Generations at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. (1997). Her work can be found in the collections of the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; the Hood Museum of Art; and the Heard Museum, Phoenix. A 2017–2019 George Kaiser Family Foundation Tulsa Artist fellow and a 2020–2022 Tulsa Artist Fellowship Arts Integration Award winner, Fields was the invited artist for the 2021 Eiteljorg Museum of Contemporary Art Fellowship. That same year she was named a National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage fellow and received an Anonymous Was A Woman Award.

Working with gestural painting and embroidery, Jessica Rankin is intuitive in her approach. Drawing on a wide range of subject matter, she fuses personal experience and memory with politics, history, literature and poetry. Continuing to develop her own individual language of abstraction, Rankin focuses on the landscape as carrier of human emotions and conduit for poetical narratives. Emerging from a close reading of poetry, Rankin compresses various themes and viewpoints into single paintings, interpreting emotion, sensation and experience with form and color.

Faith Ringgold, born 1930 in Harlem, New York, is a painter, sculptor, teacher, activist and author of numerous award-winning children’s books. Ringgold received her B.S. and M.A. degrees in visual art from the City College of New York in 1955 and 1959. Professor emerita of art at the University of California, San Diego, Ringgold has received twenty-six honorary doctorates. Known for her oil paintings from the 1960s and narrative painted story quilts, Faith created a body of work in the 1970s that reflected her political activism and personal story within the context of the women’s movement. This body of work, including thangkas and soft sculptures, led to Ringgold’s painted story quilts, which she developed into a unique medium all her own. Tar Beach, her first children’s book, has won over 20 awards and is now one of 20 children’s books Faith has written/illustrated. Ringgold is the recipient of more than 80 awards and honors, and her work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums in both the United States and abroad.

Since the 1960s, Michelle Stuart has been internationally recognized for innovative works that synthesize Land Art, drawing, and sculpture. Her original approach to material and process has seen her create works on the land, conceptual and sculptural installations incorporating objects, drawings, and audiovisual elements. Photographs, drawings, and sculptures bring the material of landscape into the gallery. Photography has been present since that time, and has been her primary medium since 2009. Recently, Stuart has used her archive of analog and digital photographs amassed for half a century, activating their aesthetic potential by recontextualizing them to weave pictorial essays.

2022 Presenters

Ariel Aisiks is founder and president of the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA). Based in New York City, ISLAA was founded in 2011 to advance scholarship, public engagement, and the international visibility of art from Latin America. Its programming initiatives, involving research, publications, exhibitions, and university partnerships, are aimed at expanding and enriching extant narratives of modern and contemporary art.

This year, ISLAA announced the recipients of the inaugural ISLAA Research Grant. With the goal of nurturing the formidable talent of emerging scholars, the grant recognizes and encourages academic projects that represent novel investigations into themes, geographies, and chronologies of modern and contemporary art and visual culture from Latin America, the Caribbean, and the diaspora.

Brooke Kamin Rapaport is Deputy Director and Martin Friedman Chief Curator at Madison Square Park Conservancy in New York, where she is responsible for the outdoor public sculpture program of commissioned work by contemporary artists. She was commissioner and curator of the United States Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale with the exhibition Martin Puryear: Liberty/Libertà (2019), and is founder of Public Art Consortium, a national initiative of museum, public art, and sculpture park curators launched in 2017. She was a long-term curator at the Brooklyn Museum where she organized major exhibitions and wrote corresponding catalogs and has been a guest curator at the Jewish Museum in New York.

Julie Mehretu is a world-renowned painter who lives and works in New York City. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (2005) and the US Department of State Medal of Arts Award (2015). Mehretu’s work has been exhibited extensively in museums, biennials and galleries and is represented in public and private collections worldwide.

Seph Rodney, Ph.D., was born in Jamaica and came of age in the Bronx, New York. He is a former senior critic and opinions editor for Hyperallergic. He now regularly contributes to The New York Times, and has written for CNN, NBC, American Craft magazine and penned catalog essays for Crystal Bridges Museum, the Mississippi Museum of Art, Teresita Fernandez, Meleko Mokgosi, and Sarah Oppenheimer. He can be heard weekly on the podcast The American Age. His book, The Personalization of the Museum Visit, was published by Routledge in May 2019. In 2020, he won the Rabkin Prize for arts journalism.

Mary Sabbatino is vice president and partner of Galerie Lelong & Co., New York. She was appointed director of the New York location of the gallery in 1991 and became a partner in 2007. Championing a diverse roster of contemporary artists from around the world, the gallery has pioneered in featuring a balanced roster of male and female artists, and presenting artists from the Global South. In 2021, Sabbatino was named a Chevalier (knight) of the prestigious Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of Arts and Letters) by the government of France.

2019 Artists

The 2019 Francis J. Greenburger honor artists Ralph Lemon, John Newman, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Jennifer Bartlett, and Johannes Giardoni. The 2019 Francis J. Greenburger awards are presented by Alice Aycock, Charlotta Kotik, Lili Chopra, Marianne Boesky, and Anders Schroeder.

Jennifer Bartlett (b 1941) is known for her room sized installations ranging in medium, that explore her immediate environments including houses, mountains, trees, gardens and the ocean. Inspired by Minimalism, she started working on square steel enameled plates in 1968 on which she went on to create her most notable works. Rhapsody (1975-1976), a polyptych first installed at Paula Cooper Gallery filling the entirety of the gallery, included hundreds of these painted steel plates. That work is now part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her work has moved from Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism to Conceptualism with some works touching on all at once. Working in two dimensions and occasionally moving to three, her works often start in a controlled, mathematical abstraction and move to more painterly realism.

Bartlett’s first survey exhibition was held in 1985 and traveled to the Walker Art Center, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute. In 2006, her early enameled steel plate paintings were surveyed at the Addison Gallery of American Art. Klaus Ottman curated her second travelling survey exhibition in 2013-14, Jennifer Bartlett: History of the Universe—Works 1970–2011, which travelled to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Parrish Art Museum. In 2014, the Cleveland Museum of Art exhibited all three of her monumental plate pieces, Rhapsody, Song, and Recitative in the exhibition Epic Systems. Bartlett’s works are in the collections of of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others.

Johannes Girardoni has dedicated the last two decades to a complex and precise exploration of the limits of perception through material and light. Shifting between disciplines—sculpture, installation art, and photography—his work is concerned with creating new definitions of space through digital and analogue media.

The artist studied at the M.I.T. Media Lab, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine. His art has been shown in museums and galleries worldwide, including the Ludwig Museum, Cologne; the Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the Austrian Cultural Forum, New York. In 2011, he participated in Personal Structures at the 54th Venice Biennale. His works can be found in the collections of the Akzo Nobel Art Foundation, Arnhem; the Austrian Cultural Forum, New York; the CALDIC Collection, Rotterdam; the Harvard Art Museum; the Margulies Collection, Miami; and the Progressive Art Collection, Cleveland, among others.

John Newman is an artist presently living and working in New York City. He was born in Flushing, NY in 1952 and received his BA from Oberlin College in 1973. He attended the Whitney Museum Study Program in 1972, received his MFA in 1975 from the Yale School of Art and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT from 1975-78. He has had over 50 one-person shows and participated in numerous group exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. His sculpture, drawings and prints are represented in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney Museum, the Tate, the National Gallery of Australia, the Albertina Museum in Vienna among many others. He has been the recipient of the many awards and residencies including the Rome Prize, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Chinati Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Gottlieb Foundation, the Pollack Krasner Foundation, the NEA and a Senior Research Fulbright Grant to India. He is the former Director of Graduate Studies in Sculpture at the Yale School of Art and has taught and lectured in many universities and museums throughout the United States, Europe and Asia including the School of Visual Arts in NYC, Virginia Commonwealth University, Ecole Superiere d’Art Visuel in Geneva, the Yokohama Museum of Art and the Visva-Bharti University, Santiniketan in India. He has also been commissioned to do several large-scale outdoor commissions for the City of Richmond, Virginia, Dai Nippon in Tokyo, Storm King Art Center, and Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton New Jersey. His work has been written about and reviewed in the NY Times, New York Magazine, Art in America, Artforum, BOMB magazine, Sculpture magazine and numerous other publications. John Newman lives in NYC.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles was born and raised in Denver Colorado. She received a BA in international relations and history from Barnard College in 1961, and an MA in Interrelated Arts from New York University in 1974. Since 1977, when she became the official, unsalaried Artist-in-Residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation—a position she still holds—she has created art that deals with the endless maintenance and service work that “keeps the city alive,” and projects to transform degraded land and water. Ukeles believes art creates freedom and asks whether we can design modes of survival -- for a thriving planet, not an entropic one – that do not crush our personal and civic freedom and silence the individual’s voice. Can we be transformed as we transform?

Her artwork, blurring/crashing boundaries between labor and performance, system and spirit, unveils connections between feminism, workers’ rights, the environment, and democratic culture.
She had a 50 year museum-wide career survey at the Queens Museum, NYC, from September 18, 2016 to February 19, 2017. Her most well known projects include MANIFESTO FOR MAINTENANCE ART 1969!, TOUCH SANITATION PERFORMANCE (1979-80), and CEREMONIAL ARCH HONORING SERVICE WORKERS (1988-2017). She has completed seven Work Ballets co-choreographed with workers, barges, and hundreds of tons of recyclables in France, Holland, Japan, Pittsburgh and NYC (1983-2013). Environmental transformation projects for landfills include her Percent for Art commission called LANDING, the first permanent environmental public artwork, for Freshkills Park in Staten Island, NY.

Two books have recently been published about her work: MIERLE LADERMAN UKELES: MAINTENANCE ART, Prestel, 2016 and SEVEN WORK BALLETS, Sternberg, 2015.

Other recent and earlier exhibitions were at the Whitney Museum; P.S. 1/MOMA; Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; Kunstverein Graz, Austria; 13th Istanbul Biennial; Sharjah Biennial 8; Manifesta 10, St. Petersburg; Armory Art Show; Wellcome Trust, London; Los Angeles MOCA; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford. Permanent collections holding her works include the Whitney, Guggenheim, Art Institute of Chicago; Jewish Museum NYC, Smith College Museum, Migros Museum, Zurich, and the Wadsworth Athenaeum. Awards presented to the artist include multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the NY State Council on the Arts, fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim, Andy Warhol, Joan Mitchell, the Foundation for Jewish Culture, and Anonymous Was a Woman Foundations among others. Honorary doctorates include the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Rhode Island School of Design and the Maine College of Art. She lectures internationally and presently teaches at Bezalel MFA in Tel Aviv. The Smithsonian Archives of American Art has just acquired her papers. She is represented by Ronald Feldman Gallery in NYC.

Ralph Lemon, is choreographer, writer, visual artist and curator, and the Artistic Director of Cross Performance, a company dedicated to the creation of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary performance and presentation. His most recent works include Scaffold Room (2015), Four Walls (2012), and How Can You Stay in The House All Day And Not Go Anywhere? (2008-2010), works with live performance, film and visual art that toured throughout the U.S. The immersive visual art installation, Meditation, which was part of How Can You Stay, was acquired for the permanent collection of the Walker Arts Center in 2012. In January 2011, a re-imagined section of How Can You Stay was per-formed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in conjunction with On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century. Mr. Lemon curated the fall 2012 performance series “Some sweet day” at MOMA, and the acclaimed 2010 performance series “I Get Lost” at Danspace Project in NYC. His solo visual art exhibitions include: 1856 Cessna Road at Studio Museum in Harlem, NYC (2012); How Can You Stay In The House All Day And Not Go Anywhere?, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2010); (the efflorescence of) Walter, Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans (2008), The Kitchen, NYC (2007) and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2006); The Geography Trilogy, Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT (2001); and Temples, Margaret Bodell Gallery, NYC (2000).  His group exhibitions include: Move: Choreographing You, Hayward Gallery, London, UK and The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, Nasher Museum at Duke University, Durham, NC. In 2012, Mr. Lemon was honored with one of the first Doris Duke Performing Artist Awards; he was also one of the first artists to receive the United States Artists Fellowship (2006). He is recipient of three "Bessie" Awards (1986, 2005, 2016); two Foundation for Contemporary Art Awards (1986, 2012); a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship; a 2004 Bellagio Study Center Fellowship; and the 1999 CalArts Alpert Award. Among his many teaching positions, Mr. Lemon has been an IDA Fellow at Stanford University (2009); artist-in-residence at Temple University (2005-06); Miller Endowment Visiting Artist at the Krannert Center (2004); Fellow of the Humanities Council and Program in Theater & Dance at Princeton University (2002); and Associate Artist at Yale Repertory Theatre (1996-2000). For the fall 2011 semester he was a Visiting Critic with the Yale University, School of Art, Sculpture Dept. He was the 2014 Annenberg Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art, where he curated a series of “performance essays,” titled, Value Talks. In 2015 he was a Mellon Foundation Visiting Artist Fellow at Columbia University. In 2017 he was Professor of Practice of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University. He was the 2018 Josep Lluis Sert Practitioner at the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard University. He is currently Sachs Visiting Professor at University of Pennsylvania, and a Visual Arts Mentor at Columbia University School of the Arts. His book, Come home Charley Patton, the final in a series documenting The Geography Trilogy, was published in 2013 by Wesleyan University Press. He received a 2015 National Medal of Arts from president, Barack Obama. The first monograph of his work was published by The Museum Of Modern Art (part of their new Modern Dance Series) in 2016. He is a 2018 percipient of the Heinz Family Foundation Award.

2019 Presenters

Alice Aycock has lived in New York City since 1968. Alice Aycock received a B.A. from Douglass College and an M.A. from Hunter College. Currently she is represented by Marlborough Gallery, New York and Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin. She had her first solo exhibition of new sculptures with Marlborough in the fall of 2017. Her works can be found in numerous collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Louis Vuitton Foundation, the LA County Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Sheldon Museum of Art, Storm King Art Center, Omi International Arts Center, and the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, Germany. A traveling retrospective was organized by the Wurttembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart (1983) and a retrospective was held at Storm King (1990). In 2013, a retrospective of her drawings and small sculptures was exhibited at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York coinciding with the Grey Art Gallery in New York City.
 
Aycock’s public sculptures can be found in many major cities in the U.S., including East River Park Pavilion at 60th Street in New York City (1995/2014); San Francisco Public Library (1996); JFK International Airport, NY (1998/2013); GSA Building, Baltimore, MD (2004); Nashville, TN (2008); and Washington Dulles International Airport (2012). In 2014, a series of seven sculptures were installed in New York City, entitled Park Avenue Paper Chase, in collaboration with Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin. In 2016, she completed a large-scale outdoor public artwork in Coral Gables, FL, and an entrance sculpture for the new MGM National Harbor, MD. She installed a sculpture for the lobby of 50 West, New York, NY in July 2017. A permanent large-scale installation was inaugurated at Pier 27 on the Toronto waterfront in the fall of 2017, as well as an entry sculpture for the new Capital One headquarters in McLean, VA in 2018. 

Charlotta Kotik, a native of Prague, first came to the United States to work at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. During the course of her career, she has organized over 100 museum exhibitions, presenting the work by artists as diverse as Mariko Mori, Kerry James Marshall, John Cage, Jenny Holzer, Alyson Saar, Michelle Stuart and Robert Longo. From 1992 through 2007, she was the Curator and Chair of the Contemporary Art Department at the Brooklyn Museum.  There, she established one of her major contributions to curatorial practice —The Grand Lobby Projects—in order to provide exhibition opportunities for installation-based work by artists such as Martin Puryear, Joseph Kosuth, Ida Applebrook, Petah Coyne and many others. In the 1980s, she also initiated the Working in Brooklyn Series to document the energy of the nascent Brooklyn art scene. In 1991, she received the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation Award for outstanding achievement in contemporary art. In l993, as the United States commissioner for Venice Biennale, she presented works by Louise Bourgeois in an exhibition that later traveled internationally. Ms. Kotik has also organized a traveling exhibition of Annie Leibovitz’s photography, an extensive exhibition with more than two hundred Brooklyn-based artists entitled Open House: Working in Brooklyn, and Graffiti—the first museum exhibition of graffiti art.  Since 2000, Ms. Kotik has participated in the Jindrich Chalupecky Award, an important recognition for visual artists in the Czech Republic. The Award became a model for art programs in nine other post-Communist countries. Presently, Ms. Kotik works as a writer, lecturer and independent curator, and facilitates various projects for galleries, alternative spaces and museums, ranging from NURTUREart and FiveMyles in Brooklyn to institutions in Czech Republic. She teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City during spring semester and lectures at the Academy of Art, Architecture and Design in Prague. She received the Award from the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic for the Lifelong Contribution to the Field of Visual Arts in 2016 and in 2018, the Skutek Grand Prix and the Doctor Honoris Causa in Theory and History of Art from Academy of Arts, Architecture & Design in Prague. 

Lili Chopra, Executive Director of Artistic Programs at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), brings extensive experience commissioning, programming, producing and marketing international events and performance works in New York and France. Prior to LMCC, she served as Executive Vice President and Artistic Director of French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) since 2006. At FIAF, Lili founded and co-curated the Crossing the Line festival, a highly acclaimed trans-disciplinary festival featuring commissioned works with U.S. and international artists. More recently, she co-conceived and co-curated the Tilt Kids Festival, a culturally diverse and trans-disciplinary arts festival for young audiences. Prior to her time at FIAF, Lili spent four years at New York Live Arts (formerly Dance Theater Workshop) working closely with David White as Associate Producer and as Curator of its gallery. She has also worked with numerous festivals and independent artists in France and in the U.S. as an administrator and producer. She received her Master’s in Theater and Performing Arts History at Paris X University and her M.A. in Arts Administration at Columbia University.

Marianne Boesky established her eponymous gallery in SoHo, New York City in 1996. Since its inception, the gallery's mission has been to identify and support the work of emerging and mid-career international artists of all media. Among those artists whose early careers were established by the gallery are Lisa Yuskavage, Sarah Sze, Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara, and Barnaby Furnas. She relocated her flagship to west Chelsea in 2001, while also establishing multi-year project spaces on the Upper and Lower East Side.

As the gallery's program has continued to evolve, it has welcomed such critically recognized artists as Diana Al-Hadid, Donald Moffett, Serge Alain Nitegeka, and The Haas Brothers among others. It has also come to represent established artists such as Pier Paolo Calzolari and Frank Stella. In 2017, Boesky opened her newest space, Boesky West, in Aspen, Colorado. The expansion highlights the gallery's ongoing experimentations with space and architecture as well as its continued commitment to the needs and interests of its dynamic roster of artists from around the globe. She sits on the board of Anderson Ranch, the advisory board of Mount Sinai’s Dubin Breast Cancer Center, and is a member of the Middlebury Museum & Visual Arts Council. She graduated with a BA from Middlebury College in 1989 and received her JD from Fordham University in 1995.

PAST WINNERS & PRESENTERS

2017 Winners & Presenters

Eric Fischl / Gary Lang, Robert C. Morgan / Ryszard, Marieluise Hessel / Lorraine O'Grady, Franklin Sirmans / Barry Le Va, Angela Westwater / Judy Pfaff

2015 Winners & Presenters

Charles Juhász-Alvarado / Ursula von Rydingsvard, Steve Wolfe / Roland J. Augustine, Alison Knowles / Claire Bishop, Suchan Kinoshita / Oliver Kruse, Malcolm Morley / Andy and Christine Hall

2013 Winners & Presenters

Bruce Porter / Frank Stella, Peter Saul / Mary Boone, Jonas Mekas / Phong Bui, Richard Nonas / Joe Thompson, Elaine Reichek / Melva Bucksbaum

2008 Winners & Presenters

Brice Marden / Mel Kendrick, Rhona Hoffman / Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Kim Levin / Sturtevant, Tom Healy / Joan Jonas, Carol & Arthur Goldberg / Helen Levitt

2005 Winners & Presenters

Pat Steir / Stephen Mueller, Betty Cuningham / John Lees, Walter Robinson / James Romberger, Lisa Phillips / Bruce Conner, Don and Mera Rubell / George Condo

2003 Winners & Presenters

Leon Golub / Kazuko Miyamoto, Barbara Gladstone / Robert Bechtle, Michael Brenson / Dorothea Rockburne, Ann Philbin / Lee Bontecou, Martin Z. Margulies / Joe Zucker

2001 Winners & Presenters

Chuck Close / Mark Greenwold, John Weber / Sven Lukin, Lilly Wei / Nancy Haynes, Bonnie Clearwater / Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Werner H. Kramarsky / Albert York

1992 Winners & Presenters

Presenter/ Recipient, George Segal / Gary Kuehn, Richard Gray / Magdalena Abakanowicz, Werner Schmalenbach / Hubertus Gojowczyk, Agnes Gund / Winifred Lutz

1988 Winners & Presenters

Anthony Caro / Lawrence Poons, Paula Cooper / Julian Lethbridge, Pierro Schneider / Michael Haas, Earl A. Powell III / Emerson Woelffer, Patsy and Raymond Nasher / Martin Puryear

1987 Winners & Presenters

Helen Frankenthaler / André Fauteux, Leo Castelli / Nassos Daphnis, Hilton Kramer / Julius Hatofsky, William S. Lieberman / Loren MacIver, Charles Benenson / Luis Jimenez

1986 Winners & Presenters

Robert Motherwell / Anthony Terenzi, André Emmerich / Willard Boepple, Clement Greenberg / Darby Bannard, Thomas Messer / Rosemarie Koczy, Eloise Spaeth / John Registe