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Found objects win artist US$250,000 prize

By Patrick Cole
BLOOMBERG
Wednesday, Sep 10, 2008, Page 15

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Ann Hamilton, a visual artist known for her eye-popping installations including paper-sucking machines and a weeping wall, is among the winners of the Heinz Family Foundation’s Human Achievement Awards.

Hamilton, 52, a professor of sculpture at Ohio State University in Columbus, won the US$250,000 cash award for wildly creative installations that often use items culled from flea markets and warehouses, Kim O’Dell, director of the Heinz Awards, said in a phone interview.

“Her art engages you in a way that walking past traditional works of art wouldn’t do,” O’Dell said. “Everyone we spoke to talked about how inspiring it is to work with her.”

She’ll receive the award on Oct. 21 at a ceremony in Pittsburgh, where the Heinz Foundation is based, O’Dell said.

Hamilton specializes in works created for the locations where they’re exhibited, relying on found objects, videos, photographs, textiles and other materials. In Corpus, her 2004 show at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, she installed 40 machines onto a gallery ceiling and had them descend to the floor, suck up sheets of translucent, onionskin paper and later release them.

In another installation, Welle, more commonly called “The Weeping Wall,” drops of water were pumped through tiny holes in a flat white wall.

The Heinz Award is the latest major prize Hamilton has won. She received a US$500,000 “genius grant” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1993. She won fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 1999 she was chosen to represent the US at the 48th Venice Biennale, one of the world’s most important contemporary art shows.

Now in their fourteenth year, the Heinz Awards honors those who have distinguished themselves in the arts and humanities, the environment, technology, the economy and by improving the human condition.

Other recipients this year are Thomas FitzGerald, 53, founder and director of the Kentucky Resources Council, for improving the environmental landscape in his home state; and Brenda Krause Eheart, 64, founder of Generations of Hope and Hope Meadows in Champaign, Illinois, for her work with foster children and their families.

Robert Greenstein, 62, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington-based research group that focuses on budget and tax policy, received an award for helping make anti-poverty programs more effective and efficient.

Joseph DeRisi, 38, a molecular biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, was cited for improving methods of detecting malaria and other infectious diseases.

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