January 28th, 2012

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

New York, NY – January 28, 2012 – The 2012 Tribeca Film Festival (TFF), presented by American Express, today announced the 11 major contemporary artists who will contribute their artwork to the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival Artists Awards Program, sponsored by CHANEL. Works by Peter Dayton, Walton Ford, Stephen Hannock, JR, Kim Keever, Clifford Ross, Nathan Sawaya, Cindy Sherman, Hugo Tillman, Kara Walker, and Stanley Whitney will be presented to the filmmakers whose films are selected by the TFF jury as winners in their respective categories. The Tribeca Film Festival Artists Awards Program was created by TFF co-founder Jane Rosenthal to celebrate New York artists. This year’s TFF will run April 18-29, 2012.

The artwork, which consists of paintings, photographs, etchings, prints and sculptures, will be publicly exhibited free and open to the public April 5 – 25, 2012 between the hours of 11am – 7pm (closed on April 8 for Easter), at the New York Academy of Art, 111 Franklin Street, Manhattan.  New Yorkers and festival-goers alike will be able to view the works before they are presented at the Tribeca Film Festival Awards Ceremony on the evening of April 26, 2012.

“The artists awards program has been a great tradition since we founded Tribeca,” said Tribeca co-founder Jane Rosenthal. “We are so pleased to have these respected and innovative  artists involved with the Festival by honoring our filmmakers with their art.”

 

"Chanel is delighted to continue the relationship with the Tribeca Film Festival Artist Program,” said John Galantic, President and Chief Operating Officer of CHANEL, Inc. “What an honor to be celebrating our 7th year. We look forward to viewing and supporting the work of both new and established artists."

 

Following is a complete list of the artwork that will be contributed:

 

Peter Dayton: Jacobs #16 "Blue Skies", Oil, acrylic, resin and paper decal on birch panel, 24 x 14.   

Walton Ford: Nantes, 2009, Etching, aquatint and drypoint on paper, image: 39 3/4 x 29 7/8 inches. 

Stephen Hannock: Study: A Recent History of Art in Southern California (Mass MoCA #169), 2012, polished acrylic on panel, 8 x 20 inches.    

JR: The Wrinkles of the City, Los Angeles, Carl revealed on wood, 2011, 60 x 60 inches   

Kim Keever: Waterfall 104f, c-print, image: 39 x 31 inches.   

Clifford Ross: Harmonium Mountain V, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle paper, 27 1/2 x 36 1/2.   

Nathan Sawaya: Acension, plastic bricks, 52 x 14 x 16.   

Cindy Sherman: Untitled, 1980/2000, Two sepia-toned photorgraphs, 10x8 each.   

Hugo Tillman: The Echeverria, 2008, lambda print on Fuji matte paper, ed. 6, 30 x 40 in. 76.2 x 101.6 cm, 2008.   

Kara Walker: An Unpeopled Land in Uncharted Waters, 2010, Portfolio of 6 etchings with aquatint, sugar-lift, spit-bite and dry-point, A: 27x39in, B: 27x11in, C: 27x17in, D: 27x27in, E: 27x35.5in, F: 27x15in, 2010.   

Stanley Whitney: Red Top, 2012, oil on linen, 20 x 20. 

 

About the Artists

 

Peter Dayton was born in New York City and lives and works in East Hampton. His work pays homage to the high culture of post-painterly abstraction and the popular culture of surf art. He received a BFA from Tufts University in 1979. He has held solo exhibitions such as Greetings From Pleasantville, Dear Mr. Grey, P-111, Black Boards White Chicks, and Beginning of an Era in New York and outside the state in Massachusetts, Colorado, and Texas. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions across the country since the late 1980s. Dayton’s work is held in the public collections of the Parrish Art Museum, South Hampton, New York; Chanel USA, New York; Chanel Ginza, Tokyo, Japan; Neiman Marcus; Denver Art Museum; Museum of Fine Art, Houston, Texas; Green Point Bank, Brooklyn, New York; Phillip Morris & Co., New York, New York; RNR Corporation, New York, New York; Teleflora, Los Angeles, California; and Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, New York.

 

Walton Ford was born in Larchmont, New York and lives and works in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. His monumental watercolors expand the visual language and narrative scope of traditional natural history painting, meditating on the often violent and bizarre moments at the intersection of human culture and the natural world. Although human figures rarely appear in his paintings, their presence is always implied. Ford’s work is included in a number of collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. A survey of Ford’s work was organized by the Brooklyn Museum in New York in 2006 and traveled to the San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas and the Norton Museum of Art in Florida in 2007. Last year, Ford’s mid-career retrospective traveled from the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum Fur Gegenwart in Berlin, to the Albertina in Vienna and to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. Taschen Books has issued three editions of his large-format monograph, Pancha Tantra.

 

Stephen Hannock is an American luminist painter known for his atmospheric landscapes and incendiary nocturnes. He has demonstrated a keen appreciation for the quality of light and for the limitations of conventional materials and techniques for capturing it. His experiments with machine-polishing the surfaces of his paintings give a trademark luminous quality to his work. The larger vistas also incorporate diaristic text that weaves throughout the composition. His design of visual effects for the 1998 film What Dreams May Come won an Academy Award®. His works are in collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Hannock recently received an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Bowdoin College. Stephen is represented by the Marlborough Gallery.  

 

JR exhibits freely in the streets of the world, catching the attention of people who are not typical museum visitors. In 2006, he created Portrait of a Generation, portraits of suburban “thugs” that he posted, in huge formats, in the bourgeois districts of Paris. This illegal project became “official” when the Paris City Hall wrapped its building with JR’s photos. In 2007, with Marco, he made Face 2 Face, the biggest illegal exhibition ever. JR posted huge portraits of Israelis and Palestinians face to face in eight Palestinian and Israeli cities. In 2008, he embarked on a long trip for Women Are Heroes, in which he underlines the dignity of women who are often the targets of conflicts, and started The Wrinkles of the City. In 2010, his film Women Are Heroes was presented at Cannes. In 2011 he received the TED Prize, after which he created Inside Out, an international participatory art project that allows people worldwide to get their picture taken and paste it to support an idea and share their experience—so far more than 60,000 people from more than 102 countries have participated. JR remains anonymous and doesn’t explain his huge full-frame portraits; he leaves the space empty for an encounter between the subject and the passerby. That is what his work is about, raising questions....

 

Kim Keever was working on his graduate degree in thermal engineering when he realized art was the true love of his life. He moved to New York in 1980 and still lives and works in the East Village. In 1995 Keever began making his signature work through setup photography. He began building landscapes and objects out of plaster and many other materials and submerging them into water in a large tank. These new environments create a special diffused glow with the use of paint pigments suspended in the water. In the last year Keever has been in four museum exhibits: Otherworldly at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, There were Mountains, Sunsets, and Ocean Shores at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art; 25 American Artists at the Gyeongnam Museum of Art, South Korea; and Deconstructing Nature at the Hunterdon Museum in New Jersey. He also had a solo exhibit at the Charles Bank gallery in New York City and the David B. Smith gallery in Denver. Keever is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, as well as the Hirshhorn Museum and George Washington University Gallery in Washington, DC.

 

Clifford Ross began his career as a painter and sculptor after graduating from Yale in 1974 with a degree in both art and art history. In 1995, he turned his attention toward photography and other media. Clifford invented and patented the “R1” camera in 2002 and made some of the highest resolution large-scale landscapes in the world. His work is in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. He is represented by Sonnabend Gallery, New York. In 2009, a 10-year survey of his photographic work was exhibited at the Austin Museum of Art, and an exhibition of his Mountain and Hurricane series opened at the MADRE/Museo Archeologico in Naples, Italy. Among other projects, a survey exhibition is scheduled for the Museum of Image and Sound in São Paulo, Brazil for 2012. His current work includes a stained glass wall for the federal courthouse in Austin, Texas, and Harmonium Mountain, an animated, computer-generated landscape video with an original score by Philip Glass.

 

 Nathan Sawaya is a New York-based artist whose work focuses on large-scale sculptures using only toy building blocks: LEGO® bricks to be exact. For years, Nathan’s touring exhibit—The Art of the Brick® —has entertained and inspired millions of art lovers and enthusiasts around the globe. It is the only exhibition focusing exclusively on LEGO as an art medium. The creations, constructed from nearly one million pieces, were built from standard bricks beginning as early as 2000. Born in Colville, Washington and raised in Veneta, Oregon, Sawaya studied law at NYU and became an attorney before realizing he would rather be sitting on the floor expressing himself with LEGO. Today Sawaya has more than 1.5 million colored bricks in his New York art studio. His ability to transform LEGO bricks into something new, his devotion to scale and color perfection, and the way he conceptualizes the action of the subject matter, enables him to elevate an ordinary toy to the status of fine art. Sawaya’s art form takes shape primarily in 3-D sculptures and oversized portraits. He continues to create daily while accepting commission work from around the world.  

 

Cindy Sherman lives and works in New York. Throughout her career, Sherman has appropriated numerous visual genres—including the film still, centerfold, fashion photograph, historical portrait, and soft-core sex image—while disrupting the operations that work to define and maintain their respective codes of representation. A major retrospective of her work opens at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in February and will travel to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Dallas Museum of Art. Sherman has also had retrospective exhibitions at the Boijmans van Beuningenin Musuem in Rotterdam (1996), Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (1997), Museum of Modern Art in New York (1997), and Jeu de Paume in Paris (2007). Other solo exhibitions include the Whitney Museum of American Art (1987), Basel Kunsthalle (1991), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC (1995), and Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin (2006). Among her awards are the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Award (2003), National Arts Award (2001), and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award (1995). Sherman has participated in many international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (1982, 1995) and five Whitney Biennial exhibitions.

 

Hugo Tillman is a photographer and portraitist who creates based on a deep conversation with an environment and a cast of characters not his own. He received his MFA from the Pratt Institute in 2004 and has been participating in group exhibitions since 1999 at the Shanghai Biennale, Guangzhou Photo Biennale, The Today Art Museum, the Birmingham Art Museum, MoMA P.S.1, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Galleria Arte Mexicana in Mexico City, and the Berlin Biennale. His solo exhibitions include His solo exhibitions include Upper Class at the Marina Kessler Gallery and Chinese Contemporary and Daydreams of Mine at Nohra Haime Gallery, all in New York, as well as Film Stills of the Mind at F2 Gallery in Beijing, Mind Games at Louis Vuitton Gallery in Hong Kong, Film Stills at Elementa in Dubai, and Impressions of Being at Corso Venezia 8 in Milan. Among Tillman’s honors are the Pratt Circle Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement, the Schweppes Photographic Prize, and the Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward. Tillman also works with L’Uomo Vogue as a photographer.

 

Kara Walker is known for her candidinvestigation of race, gender, sexuality, and violence through silhouetted figures that have appeared in numerous exhibitions worldwide. Her major survey show, Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, premiered at The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2007 before traveling to ARC/Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Other recent solo exhibitions have taken place in Warsaw, Poland; Málaga, Spain; and Deurle, Belgium. She participated in the 52nd Venice International Biennale in 2007 and was the United States representative to the 25th International São Paulo Biennial in Brazil in 2002. Walker is the recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award, the Deutsche Bank Prize, and the United States Artists Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship. Her work is included in numerous museums and public collections, including The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Tate Gallery, London; the Centro Nazionale per le Arti Contemporanee, Rome; and Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt. She lives and works in New York City.

 

Stanley Whitney is a painter and visual artist whose investigation of color is primordial. As Bob Nickas states in his book Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting, “In the work of Stanley Whitney, color and structure, two fundamental aspects of abstract painting, become color as structure.” Whitney was born in Philadelphia and received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and his MFA from Yale University. He is represented by Team Gallery in New York and Christine Koenig Gallery in Vienna, Austria. Whitney has shown frequently in the United States and Europe. He was recently included in a three-person show at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas, and also had work featured in The Jewel Thief at the Tang Museum in Sarasota Springs, New York (2010-2011). Whitney’s work is part of museum and private collections worldwide. Whitney currently lives and works in New York City and Parma, Italy, and is a professor emeritus of painting and drawing at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art. In 2011, Whitney became the first recipient of the Robert De Niro, Sr. Prize. His most recent exhibition, at Team Gallery in New York, runs from March 29 – April 28.

 

About CHANEL
The CHANEL commitment to the arts began with its founder Mademoiselle Chanel almost a century ago.  Gabrielle“Coco” Chanel was a passionate patron and enthusiast of the arts.  She supported and collaborated with artists of her time in the art, theatre, ballet and cinema worlds?including Jean Cocteau, Sergei Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso and Jean Renoir.

The House of CHANEL continues to uphold Mademoiselle Chanel?s tradition. Karl Lagerfeld has designed costumes for many visually influential films, sustaining Coco Chanel?s precedent started in 1931 when she was contracted by MGM to design for Hollywood. CHANEL has also collaborated with filmmakers such as Joe Wright, Luc Besson, Ridley Scott, Roman Polanski and Baz Luhrmann, to create original short films for the brand.  CHANEL Boutiques across the country are deeply involved with their community by supporting arts-related organizations and helping them advance their artistic development. Additionally, the House has commissioned artists Joseph Stashkevetch, Peter Dayton, Ingo Maurer, Jean Michel Othoniel, Lalanne and Vik Muniz, to interpret CHANEL icons for works to be displayed in CHANEL Boutiques worldwide. CHANEL has also collaborated with artists to create original installations around new fine jewelry collections, most recently by Pierrick Sorin and Xavier Veilhan. 

With art playing an integral role in CHANEL’s history, it is an honor for CHANEL to have the opportunity to support the Tribeca Film Festival and celebrate the artists of this year and years past.

CHANEL, the international luxury goods company, was founded in France by Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel in 1911 and remains one of the world’s preeminent fashion houses today. The company, which is privately owned, strictly controls all design, manufacturing, distribution and advertising to ensure the highest level of quality.

CHANEL offers a broad range of luxury products, including Haute Couture, Ready-to-Wear, fragrance, cosmetics, leather goods, accessories, watches and Fine Jewelry through a U.S. network of 24 boutiques on Mainland, Hawaii and Guam, and approximately 90 locations at select retailers. Haute Couture collections are presented exclusively in Paris. CHANEL maintains 151 freestanding boutiques worldwide, including the famous House of Mlle Chanel on the rue Cambon in Paris. Under the guidance of designer Karl Lagerfeld, the House of CHANEL remains dedicated to luxury, fashion, style and image.

In 1993, CHANEL launched the CHANEL Fine Jewelry Collection and opened a worldwide flagship Fine Jewelry boutique on 18 place Vendôme in Paris. There are eight Fine Jewelry boutiques in the U.S. and 32 worldwide.

About the Tribeca Film Festival:
The Tribeca Film Festival helps filmmakers reach the broadest possible audience, enabling the international film community and general public to experience the power of cinema and promote New York City as a major filmmaking center. It is well known for being a diverse international film festival that supports emerging and established directors.

 

Founded by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff in 2001 following the attacks on the World Trade Center, to spur the economic and cultural revitalization of the lower Manhattan district through an annual celebration of film, music and culture, the Festival brings the industry and community together around storytelling.

 

The Tribeca Film Festival has screened more than 1,300 films from more than 80 countries since its first edition in 2002. Since inception, it has attracted an international audience of more than 3.7 million attendees and has generated an estimated $725 million in economic activity for New York City.

 
 

EDITORS NOTE:  IMAGES OF EACH WORK ARE AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST.

 

 

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PRESS CONTACTS:

 

Rubenstein Communications, Inc.—Public Relations

Anna Dinces
(212) 843-9253
adinces@rubenstein.com

 

Tribeca Enterprises

Tammie Rosen
(212) 941-2003
trosen@tribecaenterprises.com