Visual artist Sandy Rodriguez and hip hop dancer and choreographer Lorenzo “Rennie” Harris are among the many happiest creative artists within the country this week. They each have received $30,000 commissions to create recent work as recipients of the 2023 Hermitage Greenfield Prize.
The prize, administered by the Hermitage Artist Retreat in Englewood, annually presents commissions that rotate among the many fields of theater, music and visual art and has previously honored playwrights Craig Lucas, Nilo Cruz and John Guare, composers Vijay Iyer and Bobby Previte, and visual artists Coco Fusco, Trenton Doyle Hancock and Sanford Biggers.
To mark the fifteenth anniversary of the prize and the twentieth anniversary of the Hermitage itself, this system revealed two awards. Sandy Rodriguez, who lives in California, and creates map-like paintings that mix history, social memory, contemporary politics and culture, is the winner in visual arts. Lorenzo “Rennie” Harris, a hip hop dancer and choreographer from North Philadelphia who created Rennie Harris Puremovement 30 years ago, is receiving the primary Greenfield Prize in dance and choreography, added as a special honor this 12 months to mark the anniversary.
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Each will receive $30,000 and about six weeks on the Gulf-front retreat on Manasota Key over the subsequent two years to work on their projects before they present them with a Sarasota area arts organization in 2025.
In an interview, Rodriguez described herself as an artist and a researcher. “My work really engages with a wide range of disciplines, including art history, anthropology, conservation, consulting with a wide range of historians, artists, community stakeholders,” she said.
She creates maps following “recipes” passed down from the sixteenth century which can be “collapsing time and space and the way we arrived at this current timeframe, where we got here from. What makes this space so special and unique,” she said.
Rodriguez intends to create a map of some a part of the Sarasota area, perhaps the world across the Hermitage site. After 20 years in museum education, her large-scale maps, also include QR codes to permit viewers to have interaction more deeply with information available online and to offer curricular connections for educators and students.
She has been creating maps coping with the Southwest and Mexico over the past seven years “and I never thought I might get to do it within the Southeast,” she said.
Each winner was chosen by a three-person jury of experts in the person fields. They put together lists of potential honorees and invited a select number to submit proposals.
Her work has been seen world wide, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum and The Huntington Library.
Anne Patterson, a multi-disciplinary artist from Brooklyn and certainly one of the visual art jurors, said it was a difficult decision but Rodriguez “had done a whole lot of research for her proposal. It’s very site specific.” Rodriguez also uses local natural world “like a chemist. She takes the plants and leaves and boils them all the way down to create paint with them,” Patterson said.
Patterson was a part of the visual art jury with Christine Kuan, president and executive director of Creative Capital, and Allison Glenn, senior curator at Latest York’s Public Art Fund. The finalists were Maura Brewer, whose work has been seen on the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; Azza El Siddique, whose work has been seen at MIT List Center, the Gardiner Museum in Toronto and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto; and Joanna Keane Lopez, who has been supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and has had work exhibited on the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Art Museum and the Sarasota Art Museum.
Each finalist will receive a Hermitage fellowship and a $1,000 prize.
First time dance prize
Harris is taken into account a pioneer on the street dance movement, what jurors described as an American art form and a social dance.
“It comes from the road and doesn’t have all of the vestiges of graduates from Juilliard or the conservatories,” said Joseph Melillo, former executive producer of the Brooklyn Academy of Music and chair of the dance/choreography jury.
During a Zoom call to notify the winners together with major supporters of the Hermitage and Greenfield Prize, Harris said the honour made him aware that folks are being attentive to what he’s doing.
“Often you’re moving and never realizing that folks are watching you, you’re just in your individual world, moving straight and figuring things out, and also you never really know who’s keeping an eye fixed out,” he said.
Harris founded Rennie Harris Puremovement in 1992 to preserve and share hip hop culture through classes, workshops, lecture demonstrations and public performances.
The prize is “a serious big deal,” he said in a later interview. “We’re not a brick-and-mortar company. We don’t have a season. Whoever is fascinated with the work, that’s where we go and since of that every one of the dancers are independent contractors. Each time I’m making a work, I even have to think about money to support that or space to support that.”
The Hermitage Greenfield Prize will allow him to give attention to the creative technique of a chunk he calls “Losing My Religion,” which he said shall be a private look back on the journey he has taken through dance. It also will bring him back to dancing himself, though in a limited way.
“I ended dancing on stage with my company in about 2000, and the subsequent time on stage was 2014 or ’15. By that point, I had severe arthritis in each hips and needed to switch them,” he said. “I even have not performed for some time perhaps five or seven years, so I feel like that is my last time on stage.”
Along with Mellilo the dance jury included Charmaine Patricia Warren, artistic director for “Black Dance Stories” and an inventive associate and programming director at BAM, and Michael Novak, who was chosen by Paul Taylor to succeed him as artistic director of the Paul Taylor Dance Foundation.
The finalists were Dormeshia, a faucet dancer and choreographed dubbed the “queen of tap” by The Latest York Times; choreographer Jamar Roberts, who has created work for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, Latest York City Ballet and more; and Christopher Williams, a choreographer, dancer and puppeteer.
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