The American Academy of Arts and Letters announced today the 18 artists who will receive its 2021 awards in art. Due to the pandemic, the awards will be acknowledged on May 19 during the Academy’s online Ceremonial. The art prizes and purchases, totaling $500,000, honor both established and emerging artists. The award winners were chosen from a group of 125 artists who had been invited to submit work. The members of this year’s award committee were: Catherine Murphy (Chair), Nicole Eisenman, Ann Hamilton, Philip Pearlstein, Judy Pfaff, Joel Shapiro, Amy Sillman, Kiki Smith, and Terry Winters.
Gallery artist Reggie Burrows Hodges received the Jacob Lawrence Award in Art.
In a catalogue essay for the show, the writer Hilton Als says that Hodges’s “characters are pushing up past . . . the idea that blackness is ‘heavy,’ politically, artistically, and otherwise.” Indeed, the artist captures a number of playful or celebratory moments in his paintings: a hurdler triumphantly leaping over an obstacle, for instance, or people riding unicycles. But to my eyes, the works are still extraordinarily dense—history, heart, and meaning imbue every mark he makes.
In Inky Blacks and Earthy Pastels, Reggie Burrows Hodges Crafts Collective Portraits. Dwelling somewhere between abstraction and figuration, Hodges's impressionistic paintings enact a critique of rugged individualism.
In this moment of profound change and contraction within the arts landscape, we at the Foundation felt it was particularly important to continue with this annual grants cycle, providing artists with flexible financial support as well as the recognition essential to career progress.
Gallery artist Reggie Burrows Hodges has been awarded the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation Fellowhsip in the Visual Arts. The Ellis-Beauregard Fellowship awards $25,000 to a Maine artist working in the visual arts and is paired with a solo exhibition at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, a scholarly publication and a gallery talk.
Reggie Burrows Hodges is a California-born, Maine-based painter whose works explore storytelling and visual metaphor. His large-scale paintings—rendered in acrylic and pastel on raw canvas—explore universal subjects such as identity, community, truth, and memory, and often draw inspiration from his childhood in Compton. Starting from a black ground, he develops the scene around his figures with painterly, foggy brushwork, playing with how perception is affected when the descriptive focus is placed not on human agents but on their surroundings. Figures materialize in recessive space, stripped of physical identifiers. Bodies are described by their painted context, highlighting Hodges’ embrace of tenuous ambiguities and his close observation of the relationship between humans and their surroundings. Their quiet haziness, developed with the soft touch of Hodges’ hand, probes the imprecision of memory and examines the possibility that we are all products of our environment.
His work is held in the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, AR; Nasher Museum of Art, NC; Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris; and Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME, among others.
Hodges is a 2020 recipient of the annual Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant. As the 2019 recipient of the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation Fellowship in the Visual Arts, Hodges will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Maine in 2022.