WEST PALM BEACH, FLA.- The Norton Museum of Art announced the nominees for the Rudin Prize for Emerging Photographers, a biennial international award that grants $20,000 to a photographer who is on the leading edge of the field but who has not yet had a solo museum exhibition.
The 2020 nominees were selected by a distinguished panel of artists comprised of Cindy Sherman (American), Dawoud Bey (American), Trine Søndergaard (Danish), and Ori Gersht (Israeli).
The 2020 Rudin Prize nominees are:
• Kristin-Lee Moolman (South African, Thailand-based); nominated by Cindy Sherman.
• Jess T. Dugan (American, St. Louis-based); nominated by Dawoud Bey.
• David Spero (British, London-based); nominated by Ori Gersht.
• Lina Hashim (Danish, Copenhagen-based); nominated by Trine Søndergaard.
“Each of this year’s nominees applies a visual language that explores place, tradition, and identity,” said Tim B. Wride, William and Sarah Ross Soter Curator of Photography. “The range of imagery and conceptual approaches in the nominees’ work offers a perfect way to revitalize the Rudin Prize in our newly re-configured campus.”
Works by each of the nominees will be presented in a group exhibition, opening on February 28, 2020. The winner will be selected by the Norton’s Photography Committee, Norton staff, and trustees, and will be announced on February 29, 2020.
The Rudin Prize was inaugurated in 2012 through the collaboration of Tim Wride and collector and Norton supporter Beth Rudin DeWoody. Every other year, a panel of internationally renowned artists nominate emerging photographers whose work is on the cutting edge of contemporary photo-based art. Their work is shown in an exhibition at the Norton, and one is named the recipient of the Rudin Prize, which includes an honorarium of $20,000 sponsored by the May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, Inc.
Past winners of the award include Argentine Analia Saban, nominated by John Baldessari, in 2012; Israeli Rami Maymon, nominated by Adi Nes, in 2014; and American Elizabeth Bick, nominated by Shirin Neshat, in 2016. Previous nominators have included: Yinke Shonibare, Susan Meiselas, Michal Rovner, Graciela Iturbide, Deborah Willis, Luis González Palma, Thomas Demand, Adi Nes, Rineke Dijkstra, Michael Kenna, and Arno Minkkinen. The Rudin Prize was not awarded in 2018 as the Norton was in the final stages of a transformative construction project.
This special exhibition coincides with two other photography-centered shows at the Norton:
• WHERE? A Brief History of Photography through Landscape, on view December 20, 2019 through June 21, 2020, is the second in the series of permanent collection installations outlining the history of photography from a multitude of perspectives. The exhibition includes images by 19th-century American William Henry Jackson, famed MoMA curator Edward Steichen, modernist Brett Weston, earthworks artist Robert Smithson, and Californian John Divola, among many others.
• PHOTO+ Mixed Media and the Photographic Image, on view March 13 through September 6, 2020, brings together mid-20th century and contemporary objects to reveal artists’ experimentation, inventiveness, and creativity with photography and other media techniques.
The Nominees
• Kristin-Lee Moolman (South African, born 1984) is a South African-born photographer and filmmaker who, until her recent relocation to Thailand, lived and worked in Johannesburg. She grew up during the political transition between apartheid South Africa and a new African National Congress-led South Africa. This has had a profound and lasting impact on the narrative of her work and fuels the bifurcated visual language that drives her imagery. Moolman’s work challenges the stereotypes of African life by representing everyday life in South Africa through themes such as sexuality, violence, and black magic. She gives voice to young, black, queer lives in the current sociopolitical sphere. Moolman’s work has been shown in Africa, Asia, and the US, and has been included in magazines such as Vogue Australia, Dazed & Confused, Vice, GQ, and Grazia UK. She has also shot campaigns for American Apparel, Samsung, Triumph, and most recently shot the 2016 lookbook for Edun (founded by Bono).
• Jess T. Dugan (American, born 1986) received her BFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (2007), and a Masters in Liberal Arts in Museum Studies from Harvard University (2010). She is also an MFA graduate of Columbia College (2017), having studied with Dawoud Bey. Dugan’s work deals with identity, gender, sexuality, and community through portraits and landscapes. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions at venues including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery; the Aperture Foundation; the Museum of Contemporary Photography; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the San Diego Museum of Art; the Transformer Station; and at many colleges and universities throughout the United States.
• David Spero (British, born 1963) graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1993 and has produced a range of idiosyncratic bodies of work that place him comfortably both within the traditional practice of the great documentary photographers, as well as among those photographers of the 1960s and ‘70s who explored the conceptual ramifications and visual implication of the media. His best-known series, “Settlements,” was created between 2004 and 2018 and recorded the dwellings and lives of ecologically sustainable communities that have “returned to the land.”
• Lina Hashim (Danish, born Kuwait, 1981) is a photography-based visual artist, born in Kuwait City, who moved to Copenhagen in 1992 with her Iraqi-refugee parents. She graduated from Fatamorgana, The Danish School of Art Photography in 2012, and The Danish Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 2015. She broadly describes her work as an attempt to explain and integrate the teachings of the Koran into her life in contemporary Copenhagen. More pointedly, Hashim’s work centers around her reconciliations and integrations of the cultural conflicts and anomalies inherent in her identity as a Muslim woman living in the liberal environment of Denmark. Hashim has explored issues ranging from the wearing of the traditional hijab to premarital sex among Muslim teens, with the sensibility of an anthropologist.
The Nominators
• Cindy Sherman (American, born 1954) has been at the forefront of contemporary art using photographic imagery for more than 40 years. The images from her breakthrough Film Still series stand as a demarcation of the final erasure of the boundary between photography and contemporary art. Her works are in the collections of every significant collecting museum nationally and internationally. Her work has been the subject of major exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1982), Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (1987), Kunsthalle Basel (1991), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (1995), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1998), the Serpentine Gallery in London and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (2003), and Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin (2006), among others. Major traveling retrospectives of Sherman's work have been organized by the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam (1996); the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1997); and Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, Louisiana Museum for Moderne Kunst, Denmark, and Jeu de Paume in Paris (2006–2007). In 2012, the Museum of Modern Art mounted Cindy Sherman, a show that chronicled Sherman's work since the mid-1970s.
• Dawoud Bey (American, born 1953), New York-born, Chicago-based artist and educator, is a professor and Distinguished Artist at Columbia College, Chicago. He holds a BFA from Empire State College, New York, and an MFA from Yale University School of Art. His portrait work of under-represented communities has been widely exhibited and celebrated. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (1986), the National Endowment for the Arts (1991), and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2002). Bey was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship "genius” grant by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 2017, and in 2019 received the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography.
• Ori Gersht (Israeli, born 1967), active in England, is an internationally celebrated artist working in photography and video. Using 17th-century Dutch art historical still-life references, installations that recall the works of Italian mid-century artist Giorgio Morandi, and iconographically relevant florals, Gersht questions time, memory, and history while simultaneously celebrating the intersections of beauty and violence. He is a professor of photography at the University for the Creative Arts in Rochester, Kent, England. He received his BA, with Honors, in Photography, Film, and Video from the University of Westminster, London, UK (1992), and his MA in Photography, Royal College of Art, London (1995). His work has been the subject of exhibitions at the Tel Aviv Museum of Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel (2015); Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio (2014); Museum of Fine Art, Boston (2012); and Imperial War Museum, London, UK (2012).
• Trine Søndergaard (Danish, born 1972) is a visual artist and contemporary photographer. Søndergaard studied drawing and painting in Aalborg and Copenhagen from 1992 to 1994 and attended the photography school Fatamorgana in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her works rely on historical as well as cultural investigations into identity and image making. She has exhibited her work internationally including solo exhibitions at MuMa-Le Havre, France (2019); Thorvaldsen Museum, Denmark (2018); Museum Kunst der Westkuste, Alkersum/Föhr, Germany (2012); and Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, Denmark (2010).
