“For five midcareer pros working in film/video, dance, music, theater and visual art, the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts is a remarkable prize: $75,000 to use at a time when work is often poised to go in exciting or even radical new directions,” writes Jessica Gelt in Wednesday’s (5/23) Los Angeles Times. “The Herb Alpert Foundation on Thursday announced the winners for 2018, the 24th year that the awards … have been handed out. The winners are choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili, filmmaker Arthur Jafa, composer and pianist Courtney Bryan, playwright Robert O’Hara and interdisciplinary artist Michael Rakowitz…. Bryan works in jazz, traditional gospel, spirituals and hymns and is known for her gifted improvisational techniques.” She is a professor at Tulane University and is also 2018-19 composer in residence at the Jacksonville Symphony in Florida. “The panel wrote that she was chosen ‘for her impressive, deeply thought out, new cosmopolitan classical music imbued with fierce urgency of the moment as well as for her commitment to spirit and social justice, to shifting power dynamics and deep understanding of the effects of the human voice.’ … The awards ceremony was held Friday … at the Herb Alpert Foundation in Santa Monica.”
Posted May 24, 2018
