The Institute for Contemporary Art announced on Monday that, thanks to a new $500,000 gift, it will begin awarding an annual arts prize starting in the Fall of 2024.
“It’s the first award that the ICA has launched,” says Dominic Willsdon, the executive director of Virginia Commonwealth University’s modern art museum, which recently celebrated its fifth anniversary, “and it’s the first award of its kind in the world in that it concentrates on contemporary art and arts education.”
The Common Prize For Art and Education will be presented annually to two recipients, each receiving an unrestricted award of $20,000. The honorees will be invited to participate in a residency in Richmond and will be included in an annual symposium sponsored by the ICA.
“The impulse for this was to contribute something to contemporary art broadly that nobody else is doing,” Willsdon says. “We see prizes around the world for sculpture or film or writing or different media but no one has focused on those who see contemporary art as a site for learning, and who focus on education and the educational goals of contemporary art.” He adds that arts education can be undervalued. “We want to recognize and support individuals across teaching, writing and artmaking that have been doing good work in education.”
The Common Prize for Art and Education is supported by a $500,000 gift from the prodigious art donor Pamela Kiecker Royall, in remembrance of her husband Bill Royall. “This is entirely new,” Willsdon says. It’s a gift to establish the prize and will fund the first five years.”
He says that winning artists, writers or educators will come to Richmond and spend time here. “A big part will be programming events based on the ideas these award winners are bringing.” Common Prize honorees will work with VCU students, particularly those in the arts education department, and Richmonders who work in the field. “Since the ICA is one of the first new art institutions that are a part of a university, what’s on our minds is how we can reinvent and emphasize what it means to educate through contemporary art.”
The ICA press announcement states that the name of the prize is in honor of the nineteenth-century Common School Movement, which saw the beginnings of public education in America, “and the ways education-centered art practices engage with values of the common good.”
Awardees will be selected by a rotating international committee of artists, writers and critics. Each year will focus on a different geographic region; the first up is North America. Willsdon says that the inaugural committee will be recruited soon, and the first honorees will be announced in late summer 2024.
