February just got much brighter for Andrea Barnwell Brownlee, director of the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art.
Earlier this month she oversaw the opening of the museum’s latest exhibit from its permanent collection, “Multiple Choice: Perspectives on the Spelman Collection.” Then on Monday, Barnwell Brownlee was officially awarded the High Museum’s 2013 David C. Driskell Prize, a national award honoring a leader in the field of African-American art and art history.
The $25,000 prize, established by the High in 2005, goes to an artist or art scholar who shows promise and whose work is deemed so original it is pushing boundaries in the field. The prize is named for Driskell, a Georgia-born artist, collector and scholar, considered one of the nation’s foremost authorities on art from the African Diaspora. Driskell is a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park.
In a statement released Monday, High director Michael E. Shapiro praised Brownlee’s leadership and “vision for the museum and passion for the arts,” saying her leadership at Spelman’s museum “has helped engage thousands of visitors through highly significant exhibitions and acquisitions.” The award will be presented to Barnwell Brownlee at a black-tie dinner at the High on April 13.
Barnwell Brownlee said Monday afternoon that she got a call last month from High leadership letting her know she’d been selected for the award. Keeping it a secret was not a problem, she said, but she was relieved once the award was made public.
“It was a very humbling and very exciting call,” Barnwell Brownlee said. “I can tell you that I’m being very thoughtful about how I will use the award. It will be to further my passion and love of the discipline.”
Barnwell Brownlee, a Spelman graduate, joined the Spelman museum in 2001 and began charting a clear direction for the museum, the only one in the nation that focuses primarily on art by or about women of African descent. Under her leadership the museum has established a reputation for being one of the few museums in Atlanta where the works of African-American artists, both traditional and forward, are predominant and are consistently on view, whether the tortured sculpture of Nancy Elizabeth Prophet or the provocative photography of Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons. And two years ago the museum initiated “15 x 15” a campaign to acquire 15 works by artists in observance of the museum’s 15th anniversary.
In past years the award has gone to Columbia University professor Kellie Jones, artist Rashid Johnson and Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston senior curator Valerie Cassel Oliver, who co-curated “Cinema Remixed & Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image Since 1970” with Barnwell Brownlee for the 11th Havana Biennial in Cuba last year.
Barnwell Brownlee said she has not decided exactly what she will do with the prize, but “I don’t have a track record of purchasing things that depreciate.”
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