News
Artist Catherine Telford Keogh is the first winner of the Jack Galef Visual Arts Award.
New York-based artist Catherine Telford Keogh has been selected as the recipient of the Guggenheim Museum’s inaugural Jack Galef Visual Arts Award. The $50,000 prize is expected to be awarded every two years to support and celebrate “exceptionally talented artists whose work demonstrates innovation, depth and vision.”
Thanks to a donation from the Jack Galef estate, the prize comes three years after the Guggenheim officially ended the Hugo Boss Prize, a no-strings-attached $100,000 prize for artists in all media distributed every two years between 1996 and 2020. In a press release, the Guggenheim director and CEO said Telford Keogh “exemplifies the originality and depth that this prize seeks to champion.”
Telford Keough, who was selected from a panel of judges from the museum’s curatorial department, has cultivated a research- and process-driven practice that analyzes attributions of value and waste, as well as consumption and persistence behaviors, among other concepts related to biological and commodified life cycles. Now based in Brooklyn, the artist was born in Toronto and pursued art and gender studies at the University of Waterloo before earning graduate degrees in sculpture and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Yale University.
“I am honored to receive this award, and the timing feels important,” said Telford Keogh. Hyperallergic in an email. Alongside her practice, she is also a faculty member at the Parsons School of Design within the New School, which recently made sweeping faculty and program cuts amid a multimillion-dollar budget deficit and declining enrollment. As part of a restructuring plan, the New School recently offered nearly 40 percent of full-time faculty and all non-union staff early retirement or contract buyouts.
“This recognition comes at a time when the conditions for creation and teaching seem increasingly precarious,” continued Telford Keogh, emphasizing that New School faculty face bureaucratic measures that “threaten the very interdisciplinarity that defines what we do: the porosity between creative practice and critical inquiry that makes our community generative.”
“So receiving support for my practice right now is both affirming and clarifying: it reminds me why we fight for institutions that can contain complexity, and why that fight matters,” she said.
Telford Keogh intends to use a portion of the award to further research the metabolic relationship between microbial life and industrial contaminants such as petroleum byproducts and heavy metals within the Gowanus Canal Superfund site, stating Hyperallergic that the upcoming project “emerges from similar questions about what is valued, what is rejected, and what persists anyway”
“I am interested in how this metabolism functions as a kind of inscription, these organisms writing their survival into the material substrate,” she explains. “The job is not about ‘cleaning.’ It’s about looking at the forms of life that thrive in conditions we have dismissed and asking which forms of life we deem worthy of attention.
