NEW YORK.- Creative Link for the Arts and the New Museum of Contemporary Art have announced that the 2008 Ordway Prize will be awarded to the influential Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles and Hammer Museum curator James Elaine of Los Angeles. Each will receive an unrestricted award of $100,000, one of the most generous international prizes in the visual arts.

The winners will be honored during a celebratory luncheon on March 3, 2008, at the New Museum on the Bowery in New York City. This unique philanthropic partnership between Creative Link for the Arts and the New Museum amplifies both institutions’ shared mission of supporting often-under-recognized creative individuals who are changing the way the world understands and thinks about contemporary culture. Named for the naturalist, philanthropist, and arts patron Katherine Ordway, the Ordway Prize was created in 2005 as a biennial award to acknowledge the contributions of mid-career artists and contemporary arts writers/ curators whose work has had significant impact on the field of contemporary art, but who have not yet received commensurate public visibility and critical acclaim.

Nominees for the Ordway Prize are midcareer talents between the ages of forty and sixty-five, with a developed body of work extending over a minimum of fifteen years. Candidates for the prize are identified through an anonymous nomination process of submissions drawn from a global pool of curators, writers, artists, and museum directors. A jury composed of visionary arts professionals then selects each award winner. The 2008 Ordway Prize jury included Jennifer McSweeney, Director of Creative Link for the Arts; Doris Salcedo, artist from Bogota, Colombia, and winner of first artist’s Ordway Prize in 2005; Vicente Todoli, Chief Curator and Director of the Tate Modern, London; and Hamza Walker, Director of Education and Associate Curator at the Renaissance Society, University of Chicago.

“We are delighted that the 2008 Ordway Prize has been awarded to Cildo Meireles and James Elaine,” said Jennifer McSweeney. “Cildo Meireles’ substantial career continues to affect generations of Latin American artists, and it is our privilege to be able to recognize his profound impact and talent. For the past twenty-five years, James Elaine’s remarkable vision and tireless championing of emerging artists has given talents such as Kara Walker, Jim Hodges, and Teresita Fernandez their earliest institutional exhibitions. It is our honor to celebrate two such influential beacons of international culture and thought.”

“In the New Museum’s inaugural year in our new home, we are thrilled to continue to foster new art and new ideas by partnering with a likeminded institution such as Creative Link for the Arts to honor Cildo Meireles and James Elaine, two forword thinking visionaries impacting the present and future of the contemporary arts,” said Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis Director, New Museum. “Those chosen as recipients of this prestigious award now, and in the years to come, exemplify the open and fearless creative approach that the New Museum and Creative Link for the Arts were founded to support and cultivate.”

The inaugural recipients of the Ordway Prize were Colombian artist Doris Salcedo and curator Ralph Rugoff, formerly of the California College of Arts in San Francisco, California, and now curator and director of the Hayward Gallery, London. Prior to the Ordway Prize, Creative Link (formerly the Penny McCall Foundation) awarded grants to emerging artists and arts writers/curators, such as Jim Hodges, Ann Hamilton, Stephen Vitiello, and Allora and Calzadilla, among others.

Emerging in the 1960s when international art was undergoing formal and conceptual shifts, Cildo Meireles helped galvanize theoretical discussions about art and its relationship to the larger social world in which it operates, producing provocative, poignant, technically daring, and deeply influential art from his home base in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Over four decades, Meireles became one of the most influential living artists in post-war Latin American art, combining a strong interest in ethical relationships, conceptual and philosophical explorations, and the physical and sensual experience of the viewer. In 1970, at a time when Brazil’s official media was tightly controlled by a handful of individuals, and government censors exerted control over artists in every discipline, Meireles famously created Insertions Into Ideological Circuits, printing politically charged slogans on currency and Coca-Cola bottles before returning them to circulation. In the years since this work appeared, Meireles’ prodigious oeuvre has been marked by consistent conceptual complexity and poetic use of materials, often in large-scale installation works that engage viewers on a physical level. He has had numerous international exhibitions, including solo shows at IVAM in Valencia (1995); the New Museum (1999); the Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo (2000); and Musee des Beaux Arts, Strasbourg (2003). Meireles will have a solo exhibition at the Tate Modern, London in 2008-2009.

James Elaine has supported local, national, and international emerging artists throughout his career as a curator. Since 1999, he has been the curator of the “Hammer Projects” series, a program that Elaine and Director Ann Philbin created, where he has organized over sixty-five exhibitions including three large survey shows. Prior to that, he was the curator for the Drawing Center’s “Selections” series in New York City. Elaine is particularly respected for his consistency in showcasing artists very early in their careers, often for the first time in an institutional setting, and thereby introducing the public to important new forms of expression. Among the artists to whom Elaine has given critical early support are Kara Walker, Layla Ali, Janine Antoni, Mark Bradford, Teresita Fernandez, Mark Grotjahn, Glenn Ligon, and many others. Elaine will become Adjunct Curator at the Hammer this month as he embarks on a year of research and independent curatorial work in China.