Judith Rodin, President of the Rockefeller Foundation Foundation Bellagio Center Creative Arts Fellowship Announcement
The Landau, The Langham Hotel – London, England
As Frieze week accelerates, we join together in the heart of London for several significant reasons. We celebrate three groundbreaking artists, who hail from nations around the globe, and whose contributions spring from the studio: An installation artist and sculptor from Madina-Accra, Ghana who directs imaginative energies toward mobilizing social change. A visual provocateur, from Beirut via London and Berlin, who bridges minimalism’s clarity with surrealism’s humor in a poetic and political oeuvre. And an experimental painter from Pakistan – and MacArthur Genius Award-winner – who shatters the barriers between east and west, indigenous and foreign, Christian and Islamic, and inspires us all to transcend borders and categorization in our own lives and ways of seeing the world.
We also celebrate the transformational power of cultural innovation and creative expression. We celebrate the essential function of right brain ingenuity in left brain problem solving. We celebrate the bedrock recognition that artistic progress and social progress goes hand-in-hand. And, at the Rockefeller Foundation, we celebrate one more mile-marker in a nearly century long journey promoting the arts and humanities as a vehicle through which we advance our mission: the betterment of humankind.
