ASPEN, CO.- The Aspen Art Museum announced American artist Mary Weatherford as the recipient of its 2020 Aspen Award for Art. Weatherford will be honored at the AAM’s annual ArtCrush summer gala on Friday, August 7, 2020, and will give an artist talk starting at 5 p.m on Thursday, August 6, 2020. Her work will also be the subject of a forthcoming Aspen Art Museum solo exhibition opening October 2020.

The Aspen Award for Art was established by the museum in 2005 to recognize individual artists making exemplary contributions to the expression and/or application of contemporary art. Weatherford joins previous Aspen Award for Art honorees Richard Tuttle, Tony Feher, Jim Hodges, Ed Ruscha, Fred Tomaselli, Marilyn Minter, Roni Horn, Tom Sachs, Teresita Fernández, Ernesto Neto, Lorna Simpson, Gabriel Orozco, Lawrence Weiner, Rashid Johnson, and Lisa Yuskavage.

Mary Weatherford lives and works in Los Angeles. Born in Ojai, California, she earned a B.A. from Princeton University and an M.F.A. from the Milton Avery School of Fine Arts at Bard College, and was a Helena Rubinstein Fellow of the Whitney Independent Study Program. For more than three decades, Weatherford has expanded the possibilities for abstract painting, engaging with the medium’s legacy from a feminist perspective while simultaneously grappling with the full breadth of her experience outside the studio. Often making work that evokes specific times, places, and memories, as well as cultural touchstones like novels and music, she employs abstraction as a means of exploring the world around her. Her inclusion of sculptural elements––including the working neon lights that appear in and around her recent paintings––provides an elusive and radical revision of gestural abstraction. Weatherford has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum, Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, California (2014); Todd Madigan Gallery, California State University at Bakersfield, California (2012); and LAXART, Los Angeles (2012). She has been included in numerous survey and biennial exhibitions, including The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014).