Congratulations to Ann Hamilton!

We at the Wex were thrilled yesterday to hear that Ann Hamilton, a Wexner Center Artist Residency Award recipient and professor at The Ohio State University, will receive a 2014 National Medal of Arts at the White House on Thursday, September 10. She's joining illustrious company, including such artists as John Baldessari and previous collaborators Meredith Monk and Alice Waters.

Wexner Center Director Sherri Geldin says “We are thrilled that this supreme national honor has been bestowed on Ann, an artist whose singular body of work over four decades has indisputably amplified the very definition and experience of contemporary art. She is among a handful of artists with whom the Wexner Center has engaged on multiple occasions—through residencies, commissions, exhibitions, and performance—and the cumulative impact of her practice here and throughout the world is simply beyond measure. That she is receiving this award alongside Meredith Monk and Alice Waters, two creative forces with whom Ann has collaborated over the years, makes this an especially exquisite and touching moment.”

The citation for this award states that Hamilton's "work demonstrates the importance of experiencing the arts first-hand in the digital age," and we couldn't agree more. The immersive and interactive elements of her work offer participants spellbinding opportunities to experience art in a direct and unique manner, making that up-close-and-personal engagement an integral part of the work. It was just this past spring that the theater is a blank page, Hamilton's residency award collaboration with Anne Bogart and SITI Company, made its world premiere here, playing to full houses for its entire run. (If you missed it, be sure to check out great coverage from osu.edu and WOSU Public Media's "Broad and High" television program.)

Also among Hamilton's remarkable projects here at the Wex are mercy, a 2001 performance with Monk, and the body and the object: Ann Hamilton 1984–1996, her Wexner Center–organized retrospective exhibition and the culmination of a previous Wexner Center Artist Residency Award in visual arts. 

Please join us in congratulating Ann—and the entire roster of artists—on this extraordinary honor!