WOMEN’S PRIZE
$50,000 award, solo exhibition reserved for female artists
The Pittsburgh Foundation has established the Bennett Prize to recognize and encourage emerging women artists who paint in the figurative realist style.
The biennial award comprises $50,000 and a solo museum exhibition. Art collectors Steven Alan Bennett and Elaine Melotti Schmidt of San Antonio, Texas, endowed a $3 million fund at The Pittsburgh Foundation to ensure that the prize will be awarded every two years in perpetuity.
The inaugural exhibition will open May 2, 2019, at the Muskegon Museum of Art, Muskegon, Mich. A jury of four will select 10 painters from among the entrants, each of whom will receive $1,000 to participate in the opening. The winner will be announced that evening and receive $25,000 for each of the following two years to support work on a solo exhibition to open in 2021 at the museum.
The call for entries begins April 13 and ends Sept. 28, 2018 (submission information is at www.thebennettprize.org).
Mr. Bennett and Ms. Schmidt, who are married, were first alerted to The Pittsburgh Foundation by their financial planner, who is from Pittsburgh. After meeting with foundation staff
and learning about its Center for Philanthropy, “we were quite convinced that they were the whole package,” Mr. Bennett said by phone from Texas.
“We had a vision. We had a clear-cut idea of what we wanted to do, and the way the center helped to bring the vision to reality was just wonderful. We were delighted with both the attitude as well as the style of [the center]. We’ve worked on this for a couple of years, and they’ve been with us all the way.”
The benefactors encourage submissions from “any woman artist who applies paint or pigment to a two-dimensional surface,” Mr. Bennett said. “We want to propel the careers of people who have not yet been fully recognized for their professional achievements,” including new artists and those who have painted for many years. Entrants may not have been paid or received an award of $25,000 or more for a single work.
“If the artist hasn’t done any of those, then she is eligible,” he said.
The collectors hope that the prize will call attention to the winners and finalists, giving them an opportunity to join the largely male artist presence in museums and galleries. Mr. Bennett also believes figurative realism is becoming increasingly popular after having fallen out of favor in the latter half of the 20th century, and he would like such works to be seen by a wider audience.
Both Mr. Bennett and Ms. Schmidt are retired. He is a lawyer and former COO of a major financial firm; Ms. Schmidt ran a school and has a background working with children with disabilities.
The Muskegon Museum of Art was chosen to be the launch site for the project in part because Ms. Schmidt is a native of Michigan, Mr. Bennett said. “I can’t say it was the sole reason to pick the museum, but it explains our affinity for Michigan.”
Muskegon is on Lake Michigan, about 100 miles northwest of the state capital of Lansing. Some of its collection focuses are American art, studio glass and contemporary art. The original museum building was dedicated in 1912, and the average attendance is 30,000 visitors annually.
The jury comprises Mr. Bennett, noted realist artists Maria Tomasula and Andrea Kowch, and Art Martin, Muskegon Museum of Art director of collections and exhibitions/senior curator.
“Our focus is to rely heavily on the input of the women artists,” Mr. Bennett said.
The private Bennett-Schmidt collection is 100 percent women painters, most still living and depicting a woman in the composition, Mr. Bennett said. Most of the artists are in the prime of their careers, but a spectrum of age and reputation is represented. He gave as examples Xenia Hausner, an Austrian artist born in 1951, whose “Let’s Dance” he described as “a very striking piece of work,” and Harmonia Rosales, a 30-something Afro-Cuban American and Chicago native who painted “America’ s Civilized .”“She’ s going to be somebody,” Mr. Bennett-predicted.
Plans are underway to travel the exhibitions after their Michigan runs.
“We’re hopeful that both shows — the finalists’ work and the winner’s work — will be able to travel to venues all over the country so that people from all walks of life will be able to see them,” Mr. Bennett said.
Although the digital age has introduced art to a wider audience, “nothing — nothing with a capital N — beats being able to see a painting face to face. Nothing, nothing, nothing,” Mr. Bennett said.
He has a bachelor’s degree in art history and admired pictures of the late American artist Edward Hopper’s painting “Nighthawks,” but “the first time I saw it at the Art Institute of Chicago I was moved beyond words.”