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Deana Lawson has won the Hugo Boss Award, which is among the top art awards in the world and is awarded to one artist every two years. The New York-based photographer will now take home $ 100,000 and, as part of the award, will have an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in the spring of 2021. She is now the first photographer to win the award, which has Ha historically gone to artists who make monumental sculptures and video installations.
Lawson’s photography focuses on black men and women, presenting them in poses and settings that appear to be very naturalistic, but are in fact carefully prepared in advance. They tend to feature individuals who appear to be families and couples, and allude to stories of dislike and racism in the process. “Photography,” Lawson once said, “has the power to make history and the present moment speaks to each other.”
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It is a body of work that, due to its rigorous conceptual framework, has been difficult to define. But, in his reworking of historical tropes of art and his emphasis on tenderness and intimacy, the aesthetics of his photography have proven to be influential. Zadie Smith once wrote of Lawson’s photography: “Blacks are not conceived as victims, social problems, or exotics, but rather as what Lawson calls ‘creative and divine beings’ who do not ‘know how miraculous we are.’
In a statement, the award jury praised Lawson’s work for the way it creates a “compelling new way of seeing and imagining.”
“I would like to extend a sincere thank you to all the individuals and families with whom I have collaborated on my photographs,” Lawson said in a statement. “Your generosity and trust on this trip have been greatly appreciated. As we all know, it takes a town, and with that, I would also appreciate a list of institutions, galleries, curators, collectors, writers, and fellow artists that I have worked with over the years. “
© Deana Lawson / Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
That list of institutions includes the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston and MoMA PS1 in New York, which are currently working on the first museum survey dedicated to Lawson, set to open in Boston in 2021, and the upcoming São Paulo Biennial. which commissioned him to create a new series of photographs focused on the African diaspora in Salvador, Brazil. (Images from that new series were exhibited at the Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland earlier this year.) His work also appeared in the 2017 Whitney Biennial and the 2011 edition of “New Photography,” a recurring showcase for emerging photographers at the Museum of Modern Art, as well as solo exhibitions at the Underground Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Carnegie Museum of Art.
Lawson has also been making headlines in recent months. In June, he joined the roster for David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, and over the summer, he photographed Angela Davis for the digital cover of Vanity fairSeptember issue.
Also considered for this year’s Hugo Boss Award were Nairy Baghramian, Kevin Beasley, Elias Sime, Cecilia Vicuña and Adrián Villar Rojas. Lawson was selected as the winner by Naomi Beckwith, Senior Curator of the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art; Katherine Brinson, curator of contemporary art at the Guggenheim; Julieta González, independent curator; Christopher Y. Lew, curator of the Whitney Museum; and Nat Trotman, curator of entertainment and media at the Guggenheim.
The Hugo Boss Award was launched in 1996 and has been awarded to several top talents, including Matthew Barney (1996), Pierre Huyghe (2002), Simone Leigh (2018), Dahn Vo (2012), and Anicka Yi (2016).
“As we all know, 2020 has been a difficult year on many fronts,” Lawson said in his statement. “It is during this moment that I feel the greatest call to continue the work of creating images, understanding that photographers have immense power and reinventing new thresholds of evolution and liberation”
