What, ArtInfo said this morning, no visual artist geniuses? “For the first time in 15 years, there are no contemporary visual artists on the illustrious list of MacArthur Foundation fellows,” read one post on the site.
Maybe the MacArthur judges were chastened by last year, when there was one: Elizabeth Turk. Turk makes very beautiful carvings that lie pretty much outside the mainstream of contemporary art, and critics (including some on my blog post) called them “boring.” A sample is at right.
I wondered what happened to Turk — what, in other words, happened in the wake of the award? Last month, she was in New York, to discuss her new work with Hirschl & Adler Modern, the gallery that had shown her work in 2006 and 2008. It has scheduled another solo exhibition for her next March. When I received that notice, I asked the publicist what else had occurred?
She spoke at TED Atlanta, for one. And she received a research fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution that lasts through this year. That’s pretty much it.
Whether or not you like Turk’s works or not, you have to admit that she really works hard on them. According to the description I received:
[She] works in marble and transforms a slab of one ton raw material into a seemingly weightless object. On average it takes Elizabeth one year to complete a piece. Elizabeth uses a variety of tools, including electric grinders, files and small dental tools, to transform one solid piece of marble into detailed patterns and complex shapes that range from the figurative to the abstract. The finished piece weighs between 50 and 120 pounds.