Mary Weatherford will be honored with the 2020 Aspen Award for Art, the Aspen Art Museum announced Wednesday.
Weatherford will give a talk at the museum on Aug. 6 and will be honored at the museum’s annual ArtCrush gala the following day. The museum will host a solo exhibition of Weatherford’s work, schedule to open in October.
The Aspen Award for Art was established by the museum in 2005 to recognize individual artists making exemplary contributions to contemporary art. Previous honorees include Lisa Yuskavage, whose solo show “Wilderness” opened at the museum this month, and Richard Tuttle, Tony Feher, Jim Hodges, Ed Ruscha, Fred Tomaselli, Marilyn Minter, Roni Horn, Tom Sachs, Teresita Fernández, Ernesto Neto, Lorna Simpson, Gabriel Orozco, Lawrence Weiner and Rashid Johnson.
Based in Los Angeles, Weatherford has expanded the possibilities for abstract painting over the last three decades, engaging with the medium’s legacy from a feminist perspective while simultaneously grappling with the full breadth of her experience outside the studio. A retrospective exhibition, “Mary Weatherford: Canyon–Daisy–Eden” is currently on view at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. It will travel to the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico after the Skidmore show closes in July.
She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum, Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, California (2014); Todd Madigan Gallery, California State University at Bakersfield, California (2012); and LAXART, Los Angeles (2012). She has been included in numerous survey and biennial exhibitions, including “The Forever Now” at the Museum of Modern Art.