Artist Michael Rakowitz, Who Tackles Identity, Heritage, and History, Has Won the Prestigious Nasher Prize

The Nasher Sculpture Center in
Dallas announced today that Michael Rakowitz has been awarded the
2020 Nasher Prize. With the award, which is given annually to a
living artist whose work pushes the limits of sculpture, the
Chicago-based artist will take home $100,000 to be put toward
future projects. 

Rakowitz’s heavily
research-based work straddles sculpture and installation and
contends with contentious historical legacies, from the US invasion
of Iraq to the shooting of Tamir Rice by police in Cleveland,
Ohio. He made headlines this
year when he withdrew from the 2019 Whitney Biennial months before
it even opened, making him the
first artist to speak out again what he called the “toxic
philanthropy” of the museum’s then-vice chair, Warren
Kanders.

“Michael Rakowitz’s work
bridges, on the one hand, social sculpture—what we’ve come to
call relational
aesthetics—and embodied material work on sculpture, with a great
sense of humor and a
great sense of empathy,” Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, a juror on the
prize’s awarding committee, said in a statement. “Michael’s work is
about healing and about how to take the problem of cultural
destruction and transform that into a resource for a very
optimistic vision of the reconstruction of our society.”

The Nasher Prize has quickly
emerged as one of the most prestigious awards in the field.
Rakowitz is the fifth artist to win it since it was created in
2016, joining an impressive group of former winners: Isa Genzken
(2019), Theaster Gates (2018), Pierre Huyghe (2017), and Doris
Salcedo (2016).

Rakowitz will be given an award
designed by Renzo Piano, the architect behind the Nasher’s
building, in a ceremony scheduled for April of next
year. 

Since the late 1990s, Rakowitz
has worked on increasingly ambitious projects that often take years
to realize. Through his ongoing “paraSITE” series, he has erected nearly 100 inflatable
shelters for the homeless in urban areas, each of which provides
heat through a connection to the HVAC system of an adjacent
building. Since 2003, he has served food to strangers in his roving
Iraqi culinary workshop, Enemy Kitchen. 

In 2007, he launched
“The invisible enemy should
not exist,” a series in
which he is attempting to recreate the more than 7,000 artifacts
that were destroyed since the 2003 raid on the National Museum of
Iraq and ISIS’s spree of destruction in 2015. The most recent
iteration of the project, a recreation of a destroyed statue that
dated back to 700 BC, was installed in Trafalgar Square in
London.

“[Rakowitz’s] work wrestles in
unique and revelatory ways with many of the complex questions of
history, heritage, and identity that are so much at the forefront
of contemporary culture and politics,” Jeremy Strick, director of
the Nasher, said in a statement. “Interrogating objects and
materials—their history and associations—Rakowitz weaves dense webs
of meaning in distinct bodies of work rich with insight and
surprise.”

The post Artist Michael Rakowitz, Who Tackles Identity,
Heritage, and History, Has Won the Prestigious Nasher Prize
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