Alex Katz Awarded the National Medal of Arts

When you’re working with the tradition of art, you’re usually painting like the paintings you’ve seen; your vision is other people’s vision. You see things through the culture in which you live, and the culture in which you live is always past tense. Some people are always seeing things in another time period, you have to break through, and that’s what I’ve been trying to do.

- Alex Katz

Alex Katz was awarded the National Medal of Arts on Monday, October 21st in a ceremony at the White House.

 

The awarded is given under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Arts to individuals or groups who "...are deserving of special recognition by reason of their outstanding contributions to the excellence, growth, support and availability of the arts in the United States.”

 

Artist Mark Bradford, access Queen Latifah, and filmmakers Spike Lee, Steven Spielberg and Ken Burns were among the other recipients who were given award.

 

During his more than 70-year career, Alex Katz’s work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally. 

 

 

In 2022 he had a triumphant retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York. This past summer he had a solo show at MoMA. His work is currently on exhibit in France, London and Salzburg and will be the focus of an upcoming exhibit at The Baker Museum in Naples, Florida from November 1, 2024 through February 2, 2025.

 

In a personal statement to the National Endowment for the Arts, Katz wrote, “It was completely unexpected. I’m overwhelmed by the honor—particularly, having the American government taking fine artists so seriously. Of the other artists who received it, Robert Rauschenberg is like a hero to me with his relationship to society. He gave a lot back and I try to work in his footsteps.”

 

A consummate New Yorker, 97-year-old Katz continues to live and work in the SoHo studio that he has called home since 1968, spending summers painting the landscape around his farmhouse in Lincolnville, Maine.

 

He has established a close relationship with the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, which houses a collection of nearly 900 of Katz’s works and has established a wing of the museum devoted solely to his work. He has not only donated his own works to the museum, but those of other artists, as well. He has donated the works of both well known contemporary artists and those of younger artists who are in mid-career.

 

Most recently Alex Katz gifted a 15-foot tall sculpture, done by 91-year-old American sculptor Mark di Suvero, to the Brooklyn Museum during this month’s celebration of the museum’s 200th anniversary. The two artists have never met…di Suvero lives in California…but both seem to have the same strain work ethic and are both producing fine art in their nineties.

 

“I made 32 paintings this summer,” Katz said in a recent New York Times interview. “It’s insane. I don’t know what else to do.”

 

The works of Alex Katz can be found in the collections of more than 100 public institutions around the world.

 

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October 24, 2024