Shari Mendelson, Stephen Westfall, and William T. Williams Receive 2024 Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Awards
$14,000 unrestricted cash award recognizes mature visual artists with a long history of creative practice.
New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) has announced artists Shari Mendelson, Stephen Westfall, and William T. Williams as the 2024 recipients of its Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award. The $14,000 award recognizes artistic excellence and provides resources to mature visual artists with a long history of creative practice.
With the support of an anonymous donor, NYFA created this annual unrestricted cash award in 2015 to enable the recipients to pursue deeper investigations or new explorations that can inform or enrich their work. It was 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. This year’s recipients were selected by Amy Hausmann, Executive Director of Maine Arts Commission; Sanford Wurmfeld, artist, emeritus chairman of the Department of Art at Hunter College; and John Yau, American poet and art critic.
“When writing about his practice, William T. Williams has said that ‘painting is a way of life, a way of being, rather than a profession’ and that ‘having the freedom to paint every day’ in his studio is his ‘greatest achievement,’” said Michael Royce, CEO of NYFA. “This is really what this award does, is support lifelong studio practices and open space for artists to make their work. We’re thrilled to recognize William, Shari, and Stephen with 2024 Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Awards, and thank our anonymous funder for making this type of support possible,” he added.
Shari Mendelson is a sculptor living and working in Brooklyn and Schoharie County, NY. For the past 15 years, she has been working on a series of sculptures that are influenced by Roman, Greek, Syrian, and Mesopotamian art and are constructed primarily from found plastic bottles. Mendelson has always had a very hands-on, materials-based practice. Her love of materials and process, ancient art and history, and her concern for the environment have coalesced in her current body of work.
In 2024, Mendelssohn was part of a 2-person show at the Eckert Art Gallery at Millersville University, Millersville, PA, and a 4-person show at Make Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, CA. She had recent solo shows at Fahrenheit Madrid, Madrid, Spain (2023-24); Tibor de Nagy, New York, NY (2023, 2020); and Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY (2022). Mendelson’s work is part of the permanent collections of The Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; and others.
Mendelson has been the recipient of four NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowships (2017, 2011, 1997, and 1987), a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (1989), and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Grant (2017). She has been a resident at Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Bau Institute/Camargo Foundation. Mendelson has been a visiting artist at UrbanGlass, The Corning Museum of Glass, The Toledo Museum of Art, and Pilchuck School of Glass. She has taught at many schools including Parsons School of Design, Pratt Institute, The Maryland Institute College of Art, New York University, and The Ethical Culture Fieldston School. Mendelson received an MFA degree from the State University at New Paltz and a BFA degree from Arizona State University.
Mendelson said upon receiving the Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award: “Receiving this award is an incredible honor and, at the same time, very humbling. I am deeply grateful to NYFA for the support they have offered me throughout my career. NYFA was there for me when I needed financial support as a young artist who had just moved to New York, and there for me again as a mid-career artist who needed to know that my work was seen and appreciated. I’m now at a time in my life when I want to focus on my work without distractions. This award will offer me the time and mental space to think, draw, focus deeply, and experiment in my studio.”
Stephen Westfall’s paintings have charted a course between post-minimalist geometries and a Pop-inflected awareness of a painting as a thing in the world. The brightly colored diamonds, triangles, and trapezoids in his most recent canvases are conjoined into dynamic compositional skeins that seem to lean into space rather than recede. Drawing on Caucasian and Navajo rugs; medieval heraldry; Byzantine floor tile; early 20th century abstraction; architecture; and Pop, Minimalist, and post-Minimalist painting, Westfall’s abstraction is deeply acculturated while formally honed into an active, perceptual immediacy. One of Westfall’s large public-scaled wall works which dramatically fused painting with architectural scale can be viewed at the 30th Avenue N/W subway station in Queens, NY.
Westfall has been included in several important surveys of abstract painting including Abstraction/Abstractions, Geometries Provisoires at the Musée d’art Moderne in St. Etienne, France (1997), and two New York City exhibitions titled Conceptual Abstraction, first at Sidney Janis Gallery (1991) and second that revisited that show at the Hunter College Art Gallery (2012). Recent work has been exhibited at Kunstgaleriebonn in Germany; David Richard Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; and and Robischon Gallery, Denver, CO. His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Kemper Museum, Kansas City, MO; the Louisiana Museum, Humleback, Denmark; the Munson Williams Proctor Museum, Utica, NY; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; and the Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ.
Westfall has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Nancy Graves Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He received a Rome Prize Fellowship and spent a year at the American Academy in Rome during 2009-2010. He is a Professor at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University; a former lecturer and Painting Chair at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College; and a Contributing Editor to Art in America. He received his MFA degree in 1978 from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His work was represented by Lennon, Weinberg from 1997 to 2019, and is now represented by Alexandre Gallery.
On being recognized with a Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award, Westfall said: “It is a deep honor to receive this award which, because it comes from a nomination process, means that my work is recognized in the larger artistic community. Very gratifying, humbling, and encouraging. As a painter of planar abstract paintings, it is especially thrilling that it comes in the name of the Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award.”
William T. Williams (aka William Thomas Williams) is known for his bold color and daring abstract compositions. He has cultivated a process-based approach to painting that synthesizes autobiographical reference, social narrative, and formal motifs sourced from specific cultural histories of the South as well as New York. From the outset of his career, Williams’ art has been characterized by bold color and dynamic, meticulously balanced compositions that simultaneously pay homage to and challenge the Western tradition of abstract painting. Work by Williams is currently on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of the group exhibition Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now (on through February 2025).
As a student at Pratt Institute in the 1960s, he studied under the semi-abstract painter Richard Bove, who encouraged Williams to work from intuition and memory rather than observation. After receiving his BFA degree from Pratt, he went on to study with George Wardlaw, Jack Tworkov, Al Held, Lester Johnson, and others who provided him with a rigorous theoretical education and foundational studio practice. By the late 1960s, he had graduated from Yale with his MFA degree; initiated what is now known as the artist-in-residence program at The Studio Museum in Harlem; and had work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art and included in a contemporary painting exhibition at the Whitney Museum (now the Whitney Biennial).
In 1986, Williams was the first African American contemporary artist to be included in H.W. Janson’s The History of Art (Harry N. Abrams, Inc, 1979); in the same edition that Henry Ossawa Tanner was included. In 2016, Williams was featured in the inaugural exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington, DC), Visual Art and The American Experience, and in 2017, his work was included in the landmark exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which was organized by the Tate Modern, London, and traveled to six major institutions across the United States through 2020.
Williams is the recipient of numerous awards of distinction from institutions including the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the John Simon Guggehnheim Foundation, Joan Mitchell Foundation, and others. He has garnered critical and institutional attention throughout his career with works in over 30 museum collections including The Library of Congress, National Gallery of Art, and National Museum of African American American History and Culture in Washington, DC; and Brooklyn Museum, The Jewish Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, in New York, NY. A founder of the muralist collective Smokehouse Associates, Williams is represented by Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.
On receiving a Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award, Williams said: “I am truly honored to be a recipient of the 2024 Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award. Receiving this prize is a generous acknowledgement of my lifelong commitment to being an artist; I wake every day with the desire to make art and it is my hope that my art speaks truths to others.”
Born and raised in Coney Island and the south Bronx, Murray Reich (1932-2012) attended City College and received his M.F.A. degree 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. Reich received other fellowships, including one from the National Endowment for the Arts. His work was exhibited in two Whitney Annuals and at the American Academy of Arts and Letters as well as in solo shows and group exhibitions.
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, also 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 Mount Tremper in upstate New York.
Find out about additional awards and grants here. Sign up for our free bi-weekly newsletter to receive announcements about future NYFA events and programs.
