The American artists Jennie C. Jones and Gala Porras-Kim were revealed as the winners of this year’s Heinz Awards for the Arts on Tuesday (17 September). The awards, bestowed by the Pittsburgh-based Heinz Family Foundation since 1993, come with an unrestricted cash prize of $250,000 for each artist. The awards are named for the late US Senator John Heinz and honour individuals working in the arts, economy and environment. A ceremony honouring this year’s winners in all three categories will be held in Pittsburgh next month.
The two artist honourees are known and widely celebrated for their conceptually rigorous practices, though the similarities between their works mostly end there.
Jones has introduced new textures and tones to the legacies of Minimalism and hard-edged abstraction through her work with sound art, music and painting on acoustic panels. Her major solo shows—including, in 2022, Dynamics at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the first solo show by a Black woman in its famous rotunda—often incorporate sonic elements, musical compositions or customised musical instruments. Next summer, her rooftop commission at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art will feature a group of sculptures that also function as instruments.
Jennie C. Jones, Fluid Red Tone, Bass Clef, 2023 Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York. © 2024 Jennie C. Jones
“Jennie’s work defies established genres, interlacing elements of sound, space, colour and objects in ways that are profoundly moving,” Teresa Heinz, the Heinz Family Foundation’s chairman, said in a statement. “Her layered works are immersive, inviting us to reflect and ponder while experiencing moments of subtle beauty and meaning.”
Porras-Kim, meanwhile, makes labour-intensive, process-driven works highlight issues of conservation and provenance in institutional collections. In 2019, for instance, she made a project that included a proposal to Mexico’s National Institute of Archaeology and History to create full-scale replicas of ritual elements from the Sun Pyramid at Teotihuacan that are in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. For the Bienal de São Paulo in 2021, she used a napkin to collect ash from the site of the 2018 fire that destroyed most of the collection of Brazil’s National Museum, including the fossilised remains of one of the oldest women in the Americas. While 80% of those remains were recovered, Porras-Kim’s project (Leaving the institution through cremation is easier than as a result of a deaccession policy, 2021) became a kind of improvised urn for the remaining 20%.
“It is an honour to present Gala with the Heinz Award for the Arts, not only for her work as a gifted artist and researcher, but also as a powerful force calling us to recognize that how we understand and think about history, culture and the preservation and display of historic objects has been heavily influenced by the museums and galleries that we treasure,” Heinz said in a statement. “Gala engages deeply with these institutions, calling them to examine their practices of acquisition, display and narrative, and to question ownership of Indigenous objects.”
Gala Porras-Kim, The weight of a patina of time, 2023, graphite, color pencil and encaustic on paper Courtesy of the artist
Next spring, Porras-Kim will have a solo show at the Carnegie Museum of Art, also in Pittsburgh, examining how the museum has cared for its collection.
This marks the Heinz Awards’ 29th edition, and brings the total number of honourees to 180, with a total of $37m in prize money given to date. Past artist winners include Kevin Beasley and Roberto Lugo (in 2023), Cauleen Smith and Vanessa German (in 2022), and Sanford Biggers and Tanya Aguiñiga (in 2021).
The Heinz Awards' unrestricted cash prizes of $250,000 per honouree are among the most financially significant prizes available to artists in the US, along with others like the $800,000 so-called MacArthur Genius Grants and the $100,000 Bucksbaum Award, the latter of which is given to a stand-out participant in each edition of the Whitney Biennial.