San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Four San Diego Art Prize finalists agree to share the honor
In a twist, annual award given to four women who said they would like to be honored as a group
When Patricia Frischer founded the San Diego Art Prize in 2006, she saw it as a way to bring some much-needed attention to the local art scene. Since its founding, the award has always been awarded dually to two established artists, as well as to two emerging artists, and culminating in a joint exhibition of their works. ■ That is, until this year. ■ Looking to rejuvenate and even reinvent the prize, Frischer and local curator Chi Essary took the award back to the Turner Prize roots that initially inspired it, opting to simply nominate four local artists, with a committee eventually awarding the prize to one winner.
“They all bring something different to the community, producing fascinating and unique work from different points of view,” Essary says of this year’s nominees.
What they didn’t expect was for the four nominees — photographer Alanna Airitam, installation artist Griselda Rosas, multidisciplinary artist Kaori Fukuyama and Melissa Walter, who specializes in drawings and sculptural works — to write a letter to the prize committee letting them know they wished to share the prize as a collective rather than compete with one another.
The fact that four local women made such a statement on the U.S. centennial of women’s suffrage wasn’t lost on the Art Prize committee. But their decision is secondary to the work they’ve all put in, both in their practice and their actions within the local art scene. They are artists who have not simply exhibited their work locally, but have also exhibited a desire to nurture and support the community as a whole. By choosing to receive the San Diego Art Prize as a collective, rather than as individuals, they are making a statement that the local art scene is strongest when all artists are prized.
The photographic works of Alanna Airitam are immediately stunning, often haunting the viewer for indefinite periods of time once they’ve seen them. The intricate grandiosity and splendor that goes into her portraits of Black Americans — fashioned in the style of Dutch Realism paintings — is a profound statement on representation and beauty. Her 2017 series “The Golden Age” is evidence of her commitment to, as she puts it, “researching historical and contemporary narratives of stereotypes, representation, identity and heritage.”
While Airitam’s photographs have been shown locally in spaces such as Art Produce, Quint Gallery and the San Diego Art Institute, her work is gaining national attention, having recently been exhibited in the Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago. Her new work — “How to Make a Country” (2019) and this year’s “White Privilege” — sees Airitam moving in a bolder, much more candid direction. The latter’s baroque portrayal of a cooked pig draped atop an American flag is certainly meant to make viewers feel unsettled. Still, as arts writer Julia Dixon Evans puts it, Airtam’s work remains “striking and beautiful,” the type that “transforms and transfixes.”