The Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award
The Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award provides resources to mature and established visual artists with a long history of creative practice.
New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) is proud to announce multimedia artists Nancy Cohen and Alonzo Davis as the 2022 recipients of its Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award, which was inaugurated in 2015.
With the support of an anonymous donor, NYFA created this annual unrestricted cash award of $12,000 to enable mature artists with a long history of creative practice to pursue deeper investigations or new explorations that can inform and enrich their work. It has been developed in memory of the artist Murray Reich, a New York-based painter who also had a highly regarded career as a professor of art at Bard College.
Reich’s widow, Elizabeth Weatherford, commented in 2015, “Murray appreciated the capacity of artists to turn to their inner lives, and to draw out ideas, beauty, mistakes, or innovations. He would be so pleased that this award will open up new possibilities for the selected artists, allowing them to devote concentrated time–to working, or reflection, or travel, or producing projects, or developing their archives and websites.”
In 2020, The Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award funds were donated to the Keep NYS Creating Project Grant. This program was established in response to COVID-19 to help artists in Western New York, Finger Lakes, Southern Tier, Central New York, North Country, Mohawk Valley, Capital District, Mid-Hudson, and Long Island continue their creative projects that have been interrupted due to the pandemic.
2022 MURRAY REICH DISTINGUISHED ARTIST AWARD RECIPIENTS
Jersey City, NJ-based Nancy Cohen examines resiliency in relation to the environment and the human body through paper tapestry, sculpture, and installation works. Her work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and is represented in the collections of The Montclair Museum, The Newark Public Library, The Weatherspoon Art Gallery, and The Zimmerli Museum. She has completed numerous large-scale, site-specific projects for Summit Public Art, Thomas Paine Park in lower Manhattan, The Staten Island Botanical Garden, The Noyes Museum, The Katonah Museum, and Howard University.
Hyattsville, MD-based artist Alonzo Davis’ prolific career spans five decades. A native of Tuskegee, AL, Davis moved with his family to Los Angeles, CA as a teenager and has spent the last 20 years in Maryland. Rather than reflecting roots in any one place, however, Davis’ work shows a lifetime of affinities and time in West Africa, parts of Asia, the Pacific Rim, the Caribbean, Mexico, Indigenous America, and the Southern U.S. Also contained in Davis’ works are an impassioned commentary on global, social, and environmental realities.
ABOUT MURRAY REICH
Born and raised in Coney Island and the South Bronx, Murray Reich (1932-2012) attended City College and received his M.F.A. in Painting from Boston University. Following his first solo show in New York at Max Hutchinson Gallery, Reich was awarded a Solomon R. Guggenheim Fellowship. His work was exhibited in two Whitney Annuals and at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as solo shows and group exhibitions, and he received other fellowships, including from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Reich was Professor Emeritus of Painting at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where he taught for 25 years. He served on the faculty of the Graduate Program in Art at Hunter College in New York. He was the inaugural director of Tanglewood’s Summer Program in Art in Massachusetts, and also taught at Boston University. He lived and worked in New York City, Provincetown, and Mt. Tremper in upstate New York.
2016 MURRAY REICH DISTINGUISHED ARTIST AWARD RECIPIENTS
Chuck Ginnever (1931-2019)
Jane Kaufman (1938 – 2021)
2017 MURRAY REICH DISTINGUISHED ARTIST AWARD RECIPIENTS
Merion Estes
Mario Martinez
2018 MURRAY REICH DISTINGUISHED ARTIST AWARD RECIPIENTS
Sarah Draney
Rick Klauber
Reeva Potoff
Kay WalkingStick
2019 MURRAY REICH DISTINGUISHED ARTIST AWARD RECIPIENT
2021 MURRAY REICH DISTINGUISHED ARTIST AWARD RECIPIENTS
Applications are by nomination only.
Image: Murray Reich, courtesy of the artist
