ADAA Fellowships Announced

For Immediate Release

ADAA FOUNDATION ANNOUNCES FIRST EVER CURATORIAL AWARDS

New York, January 11, 2013– The Art Dealers Association of America Foundation announced today their winners of their inaugural ADAA Foundation awards, created to support the work of members of the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC). Lexi Lee Sullivan, curator of the upcoming exhibition Walking Sculpture at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, and Natalie Mault, curator of the upcoming exhibition The Visual Blues at LSU Museum of Art, will each receive $10,000 in fellowship grant money to be applied toward research and development expenses associated with each exhibition. The ADAA Foundation Curatorial Awards were established to support yearly fellowships for a curator in a pre-World War II field and a curator in a post-World War II field.   

Formed in celebration of the 50^th Anniversary of the ADAA, the awards are intended to help museums advance deserving projects by providing critical funding for research and development.  Working in collaboration with the Association of Art Museum Curators Foundation, the ADAA and AAMC Foundations joined forces to form awards juries to narrow down the initial application pool of over forty proposals to the two finalists. The AAMC will administer the grants on behalf of the ADAA. "R&D funding is the ‘holy grail’ for curators who are trying to get a show off the ground,” says Sally Block, Executive Director of the AAMC, "The ADAA Foundation is to be commended for recognizing this need and acting on it.”

 "Supporting curators while they are in the nascent stages of developing an exhibition is of great interest to the ADAA Foundation,” says Linda Blumberg, Executive Director of the ADAA, "We are delighted to have been able to provide this support and look forward to future collaborations between curators and dealers.”

About Walking Sculpture at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum:   

Walking Sculpture will be on view at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA from May to October 2015. The exhibition, curated by Lexi Lee Sullivan, will trace walking as a sculptural practice from the 1960s to today. It will highlight artists who utilize walking as an autonomous form of art, as subject, as phenomenological and psychological investigation, and as social practice. Sculpture, film, video, photography, and performance will converge to address this multi-disciplinary practice of ambulation through the cityscape and countryside. The exhibition will occupy three floors of the museum, and will feature commissioned walks in deCordova’s thirty acre Sculpture Park, off-site tours in Boston, and planned hikes in the surrounding conservation lands of Lincoln and Concord. Sullivan has been an Assistant Curator at deCordova since 2011.

About The Visual Blues at the LSU Museum of Art:  

The Visual Blues, will be on view at the LSU Museum of Art in Baton Rouge, LA from March 8 to July 13, 2014. The exhibition, curated by Natalie A. Mault, explores the rich interaction that took place before World War II between Harlem Renaissance artists and wealth of blues and jazz music emanating from the deep South and moving north. This exhibition takes as its premise that artists and musicians blurred artistic boundaries, drawing inspiration from each other and contributing to each other’s art forms. The Visual Blues will be the first exhibition specifically to illuminate the importance of jazz and blues on visual artists, who expressed a similar poignancy and exuberance on canvas and paper. LSU Museum of Art is one of the largest university-affiliated art collections in the South. Ms. Mault has been a Curator at the museum since 2005.

About The ADAA:

The Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) is a non-profit membership organization of the nation's leading galleries in the fine arts. Founded in 1962, ADAA seeks to promote the highest standards of connoisseurship, scholarship and ethical practice within the profession. ADAA members deal primarily in paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings and photographs from the Renaissance to the present day.

Contact: Sally Block
212-879-5701
sally.block@artcurators.org