191st Annual Exhibition Awards Ceremony

Join us for a public awards ceremony and celebration announcing the winners of over $45,000 of eligible prizes, selected by an outside jury panel of critics, art historians, and curators. The jury for this year features José Esparza Chong Cuy, Kendal Henry, Nancy Princenthal, Martha Schwendener, Susanna V. Temkin, Jovanna Venegas, and Gee Wesley.

RESERVATIONS: Admission is free but reservations are required. The program will begin at 6:30 PM.

ACCESSIBILITY: This venue is fully accessible to wheelchairs. To request a free ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation or CART (Communication Access Real-Time Translation) captioning service, email your request at least three weeks in advance of the event to [email protected].

The 191st Annual: Academy Style Jury

José Esparza Chong Cuy is the Executive Director and Chief Curator at Storefront for Art and Architecture. Formerly, he was the Pamela Alper Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where he organized solo exhibitions and projects with Jonathas de Andrade, Federico Herrero, Mika Horibuchi, and Tania Pérez Córdova. He is also co-curator of the retrospective exhibition Lina Bo Bardi: Habitat, which is co-organized between MASP in Sao Paulo, the Museo Jumex in Mexico City, and the MCA Chicago. Previously, he was Associate Curator at the Museo Jumex.

Kendal Henry is an artist and curator who lives in New York City and has specialized in the field of public art for over twenty-five years. He illustrates that public art can be used as a tool for social engagement, civic pride, and economic development through the projects and programs he’s initiated in the US, Europe, Russia, Asia, Central Asia, Papua New Guinea, Australia, and the Caribbean.

Nancy Princenthal is a Brooklyn-based writer whose book Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art received the 2016 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. Her most recent book is Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s. She is also the author of the monograph Hannah Wilke.

Martha Schwendener, Ph.D., is an art critic for The New York Times and a visiting professor at New York University. Her criticism and essays have been published in Artforum, Afterimage, Bookforum, October, Art in America, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, The Brooklyn Rail, Art Papers, New Art Examiner, Paper Monument, and other publications. She is working on a manuscript that examines Flusser's philosophy in relation to art.

Susanna V. Temkin is Curator at El Museo del Barrio, and holds a Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. At El Museo she has curated or co-organized such exhibitions as DOMESTICANX (2022); Estamos Bien: La Trienal 20/21; and the museum’s fiftieth anniversary show, Culture and the People (2019). With Rodrigo Moura and Lee Sessions, she is the co-curator of the current exhibition, Something Beautiful: Reframing La Colección, the museum’s most ambitious permanent collections exhibition in nearly two decades. Prior to El Museo, she served as Assistant Curator at Americas Society in New York, as well as the research and archive specialist at the Cecilia de Torres, Ltd., where she assisted in co-authoring the digital catalogue raisonné of artist Joaquín Torres-García. Temkin has published essays and reviews in the Rutgers Art Review, Burlington Magazine, and Hemispheres; Alice Neel: People Come First (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); and authored the chronology of Concrete Cuba: Cuba Geometric Abstraction from the 1950s, produced by David Zwirner Books.

Jovanna Venegas is a curator and researcher based in New York. She is currently the Curator of SculptureCenter and formerly Associate Curator at SFMOMA. She received her B.A. in Art History from UCLA in 2010 and her M.A. in Curatorial Practice from the School of Visual Arts in 2017. From 2010-15, she lived in Mexico City and worked on exhibitions at House of Gaga, Colección Cesar Cervantes, and Eduardo Terrazas Studio. She was curatorial assistant to Lucía Sanromán on the exhibitions: inSite: cuatro ensayos de lo público sobre otro escenario (La Tallera, MX); Citizen Culture (Santa Monica Museum of Art, CA); and SITElines: New Perspectives on Art of the Americas (SITE Santa Fe, NM). Venegas has also worked on public programs and curatorial projects at e-flux, Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Independent Curators International, and the 11th Gwangju Biennale (2016).

Gee Wesley is an arts organizer born in Monrovia, Liberia, and based in New York, where he works as a Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Media and Performance at the Museum of Modern Art. Prior to joining MoMA, Wesley held roles as Program Director at Recess (Brooklyn, NY), Curatorial Fellow at SculptureCenter (Queens, NY), Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia, PA), visiting instructor at Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY), and adjunct faculty in the Curatorial Practice MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore, MD). Wesley is a co-founder and board member of Ulises, a nonprofit art bookshop based in Philadelphia. His work explores the relationship between publics and publications and how independent arts initiatives incubate new modes of curatorial and artistic practice. Wesley received his M.A. from the Center for Curatorial Studies, at Bard College. He recently curated a new exhibit, Afrophon’, at LUMA in Arles, France.

Host or Publisher National Academy of Design