ANN HAMILTON WINS HEINZ PRICE

Ann Hamilton, a visual artist known for her eye-popping installations including paper-sucking machines and a weeping wall, is among the winners of the Heinz Family Foundation's Human Achievement Awards, reports Patrick Cole in Bloomberg. Hamilton, a professor of sculpture at Ohio State University in Columbus, won the $250,000 cash award for installations that often use items culled from flea markets and warehouses, Kim O'Dell, director of the Heinz Awards, said in a phone interview. “Her art engages you in a way that walking past traditional works of art wouldn't do,” O'Dell said. “Everyone we spoke to talked about how inspiring it is to work with her.” She'll receive the award on October 21 at a ceremony in Pittsburgh, where the Heinz Foundation is based. Hamilton specializes in site-specific works, relying on found objects, videos, photographs, textiles, and other materials. In “Corpus,” her 2004 show at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, she installed forty machines onto a gallery ceiling and had them descend to the floor, suck up sheets of translucent, onion-skin paper, and later release them. In another installation, Welle, more commonly called “The Weeping Wall,” drops of water were pumped through tiny holes in a flat white wall. The Heinz Award is the latest major prize Hamilton has won. She received a $500,000 “genius grant” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1993. She has also won fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.