Cornell Eissner Artist of the Year Award
The Eissner Artist of the Year Award was established in 1997, by the Cornell Council for the Arts and the Committee on the Arts of the University Council, as an annual award to honor an alumna/us who has achieved national or international success in the arts and to recognize the artist's work by presenting their work on the Cornell campus.
In 2005, the award was renamed in honor of an endowment from Bruce and Judith Eissner, and the presentation is funded by a gift from the Class of 1963.
Artists who are in the process of emerging as leaders in their discipline are considered, along with those whose careers are more fully developed. Innovation and experimentation - as components of excellence, artistic rigor, the influential nature of the artist's work, and their commitment to engaging diverse audiences - are considered in the nomination and selection of the award recipient.
PAST RECIPIENTS: fiction writer Junot Diaz ('95); composer Christopher Rouse ( '77); writer Lorrie Moore ('82); sculptor Richard Artschwager ('44); architect Peter Eisenman ('55); theatre and movie director Gene Saks ('43); lighting designer Jennifer Tipton ('58); landscape designer Lawrence Halprin ('39); artist Susan Rothenberg ('66); and musician Steven Reich ('57).
James Siena
JAMES SIENA, BFA '79, has been named the 2009-2010 Cornell University Eissner Artist of the Year Award recipient. Mr. Siena will return to campus to receive the award, open an exhibition of his works at the H.F. Johnson Museum of Art, meet with students, and give a gallery talk.
Cornell Chronicle announcement
Cornell Alumni Magazine article
Exhibition: January 16 - April 20, 2010
Gallery talk and award presentation: April 16, 2010
H.F. Johnson Museum of Art
James Siena is one of the most inventive, independent, focused and prolific artists working today. Siena received a BFA from Cornell in 1979, and has emerged as one of the art world's internationally respected leaders whose work is widely regarded and critically acclaimed.
Siena has received prestigious awards and residencies including Artist-in-Residency, Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY (2004); Award in Art, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2000); Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Competition Award, New York (1999); and Fellowship in Painting, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York (1994).
Siena has been represented since 2004, by PaceWildenstein Gallery, New York, one of the most respected art galleries internationally. In 2004, Mr. Siena was invited to show at the Whitney Biennial: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Since 1981, his work has been included in more than 120 individual and group exhibitions internationally. He has lectured and taught at leading institutions, including the Cleveland Institute of At, Cooper Union School of Art, Massachusetts College of Art, San Francisco Art Institute, Virginia Commonwealth University, School of Visual Arts, Rutgers University, The New School, and Yale University.
His work is included in public and private collections, including Yale University Art Gallery; Whitney Museum of American Art; UCLA-Hammer Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Milwaukee Art Museum; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell; and other notable venues.
Photo of BATTERY courtesy of the artist and PaceWildenstein Gallery
Junot Diaz
2008-09: JUNOT DIAZ, MFA '95, in creative writing, fiction writer. Junot Diaz is best known for his two major works: the short story collection Drown (1996) and the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Both were published to critical acclaim. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker magazine which listed him as one of the 20 top writers for the 21st century. He has also been published in Story, The Paris Review, and in the anthologies Best American Short Stories four times (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000), and African Voices.
Diaz has received a Eugene McDermott Award, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Lila Acheson Wallace Readers Digest Award, the 2002 Pen/Malamud Award, the 2003 US-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He won the 2007 Sargant First Novel Prize and was selected as one of the 39 most important Latin American writers under the age of 39 by the Bogotá Book Capital of World and the Hay Festival. In September of 2007, Miramax acquired the rights for a film adaptation of The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
Cornell Chronicle Feb09
Cornell News Service Feb09 Diaz.arts panel
Cornell News Service Jan09
Cornell Press Office 09
Cornell News ServiceApr08 Pulitzer Prize
Cornell Daily Sun Apr08 wins-Pulitzer Prize
Christopher Rouse
2007-08: CHRISTOPHER ROUSE, MFA ’76, DMA ‘77. Rouse was born in Baltimore in 1949, and received a Master of Fine Arts and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Cornell University. Following graduation, Mr. Rouse quickly received prestigious fellowships, commissions and prizes. He has won a Guggenheim, a Friedheim, membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy, an honorary doctorate, “Best of the Year Award” from Gramophone, and has written for many of the world’s greatest soloists including Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax, and Evelyn Glennie, among others, and for leading composers and orchestras around the world.
Christopher Rouse winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his Trombone Concerto in 1993,
was the second youngest winner ever in music. He is clearly the most avidly sought-after teacher of composition in the United States. In March 2007, his long-awaited Requiem premiered by the Los Angeles Master Chorale in what was viewed as one of the most important music events of the year.
The Class of ’63 Presentation: On April 4, 2008, Rouse returned to Cornell University to receive the Eissner Artist of the Year Award and participate in a Composer’s Forum. His composition COMPLINE will be performed by Brave New Works and conducted by Chris Younghoon Kim.
Lorrie Moore
2004-05: LORRIE MOORE, MFA '82, in creative writing, was born in Glens Falls, NY. Self-Help, a collection of stories that came out of Moore's work in the Cornell writing program, was published in 1985 to high praise.
Acclaimed short story writer Lorrie Moore, gave a free public reading Monday, Nov. 8, 2004, in the Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium of Goldwin Smith Hall, to a full house, and met with students in a master class. Moore is the Delmore Schwartz Professor in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has received the Rea Award for short story writing(1986), a National Endowment for the Arts Award (1989), and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. In 2000 she received an American Academy Award in Literature.
Her publications include: Birds of America (1998), Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994), Anagrams (1986), and Self-Help. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's and The Paris Review, and they have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and Best American Short Stories of the Century (1999). They have won O. Henry Awards and the National Magazine Award for fiction.
In a 1998 interview with Moore, critic Dwight Garner of Salon.com wrote: "Moore's crackling wit and exacting eye make her America's sexiest writer; she seems incapable of putting a dull sentence to paper. What makes her one of America's most important writers, however, is the way her comedy bubbles up -- the way it does so often in life -- through discomfort, tragedy, awkwardness and loss."
Richard Artschwager
2003-04: RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER, AB '44, sculpture. Richard came to Cornell in 1941 to study the sciences. His studies were interrupted by World War II, but he returned to Cornell after the war and received his AB in 1948 in physical science. When he graduated with that degree, however, he had an inkling that he wanted to be an artist. In the course of the past five decades, Artschwager has not only become an artist but also succeeded in becoming one of the legends of contemporary art. Equally adept at painting, sculpture, and drawing, his unique vision-often demonstrating a blend of art and science-has withstood the test of time and has influenced countless emerging artists.
Artschwager's sculpture PYRAMIDAL OBJECT, 1967, was on exhibition in the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art.
Peter Eisenman
2002-03: PETER EISENMAN, B.Arch '55, architecture major. Peter Eisenman is perhaps the most well known American architect with few buildings to his credit. Eisenman has changed the discourse on architecture through his activities as a teacher, a scholar and an architect. His manifest writings and lectures are an integral part of our architectural history, no one in the architectural realm can conceive of form without references to Eisenman. A great actor on the stage of architecture and a brilliant teacher. Cornell will make a great mistake if it does not rate him as one of its best productions of the late twentieth century.
Eisenman delivered a public lecture titled “Architecture Matters,” March 26, at 6:30 p.m. in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium of Goldwin Smith Hall, in conjunction with receiving the Cornell University Distinguished Alumni Artist Award.
Gene Saks
2001-02: GENE SAKS, AB '43, theatre arts major. Saks is a noted director and actor who has won three Tony Awards and two Drama Desk Awards.
Long associated with the works of Neil Simon on Broadway, he has directed Matthew Broderick in Brighton Beach Memoirs, Alan Alda in Jake's Women and Kevin Spacey in Lost in Yonkers.
Saks is also a distinguished film director, coaching Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in The Odd Couple, Jane Fonda and Robert Redford in Barefoot in the Park and Ingrid Bergman and Goldie Hawn in Cactus Flower. As an actor he has appeared with Paul Newman in Nobody's Fool, Meg Ryan in I.Q. and Woody Allen in Deconstructing Harry.
Jennifer Tipton
2000-01: JENNIFER TIPTON, BA '58, English major. Tipton was nominated for the Cornell University Distinguished Alumni Artist Award by the Department of Theatre, Film & Dance for her remarkable work in lighting design. She studied at the Martha Graham School in New York to study and perform dance when she became interested in lighting. It was Tipton's lighting of Jermone Robbins' high profile "Celebrations: The Art of the Pas de Deux (1973) at Spoleto, Italy, that first won attention in theatrical circles. By the mid-1970 she was reguarly engaged by the New York Shakespeare Festival and on Broadway. By the 1980s Tipton was regarded as one of the most versatile lighting designers in dance.
Tipton's outstanding designs have won her numerous awards, including two Drama Desk Awards, a Joseph Jefferson Award, a Tony Award, two Obie Awards, and three Bessie Awards. n 2001, Tipton wa awarded the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for her creative vision and innovative work on productions of all scales in drama, opera, and dance.
Since 1981 has been a professor at the Yale University School of Drama, where she lights one production annually at the Yale Repertory Theatre.
In congunction with receiving the Cornell University Distinguished Alumni Artist of the Year Award, Tipton met with students in music, dance and lighting and theatre directing classes.
Lawrence Halprin
1999-2000: LAWRENCE HALPRIN, B.S. '39, in plant science, and M.S. in horticulture from the University of Wisconsin in 1941 and a bachelor's degree in landscape architecture from Harvard University in 1943.
Halprin, who is best known for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C., grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., in the 1930s, a period that saw the emergence of modern landscape architecture. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy and was a combat officer in the Pacific during World War II. In 1945 he settled in San Francisco with his wife, Anna Schuman, a dancer who developed the San Francisco Dancers Workshop. In the 1950s Halprin became involved in a new way to design public spaces, using them to link the public and private spheres. He helped redefine landscape architecture as an expansive field that encompasses the wholeness of life, rather than a series of formally designed gardens.
Halprin applied his talents and artistry to the design of urban parks, plazas, commercial and cultural centers and other public spaces around the world. In his urban renewal projects he employed expressionistic slabs of concrete that resemble High Sierra rock formations and fountains that mimic waterfalls in natural settings. He collaborated with forward-thinking architects and looked to such varied sources of inspiration as his wife's choreography, the music of contemporary composer John Cage and the writings of psychologist Carl Jung. He also experimented with "happenings"-- art events that make use of spontaneity and engage bystanders -- and workshops to involve ordinary people in the design process.
The Roosevelt Memorial, which Halprin worked on for over 30 years, embodies many of his ideas: calm enclosures, reflection, procession, varied pace and bold form. Now 83, Halprin is still interested in ideas, new social context, ecology and, in his words, "art that deals with the essential human condition."
Cornell Chronicle press release Oct99
Susan Rothenberg
1998-99: SUSAN ROTHENBERG, BFA ’66, studied at Corcoran School of Art in Georgetown University before embarking on a prolific career as a painter. She has received numerous grants, fellowships and awards including from the National Endowment for the Arts, Grand Prix at the 16th Biennial of Graphic Art in Yugoslavia, and the Skowhegan Medal for Painting. She has had one-person exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Dallas Museum of Art; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Los Angeles Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Tate Gallery, London, among others.
Her work reflects scenes from daily life through her unique style of layering paint, distinct brushwork, and a vantage point commanded above the subject. An exhibition of Rothenberg’s paintings was held at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art from August 22 – October 25, 1998, in collaboration with the Cornell University Distinguished Alumni Artist Award presentation.
Born in Buffalo, New York, Rothenberg and her husband Bruce Nauman, a conceptual artist, live in New Mexico.
Steve Reich
1997-98: STEVE REICH, AB ’57, philosophy major, attended Julliard School of Music and Mills College where he received a master’s degree in composition in 1963. Reich has been called …”America’s greatest living composer.” (The Village VOICE), “…the most original musical thinker of our time,” (The New Yorker) and, “…among the great composers of the century.” (The New York Times). Reich has won numerous awards including a Grammy for best contemporary composition in 1990, was elected to the American Academy for Arts and Letters in 1994, and has found success incorporating non-Western musical notations, such as repetitive phrasing and cyclical loops, into his compositions. Reich, during his visit in 1998 to receive the award, spoke at a Composer’s Forum, and conducted a master class. His works Music for Pieces of Wood, Nagoya Marimbas and Six Marimbas, were performed by the Cornell Contemporary Chamber Players.