Tenth Annual Award for Excellence in the Arts

Sent by: Newington-Cropsey Cultural Studies Center

Donald Kuspit is recipient of the Newington-Cropsey Cultural Studies Center's Tenth Annual Award for Excellence in the Arts.

The Newington-Cropsey Cultural Studies Center presented its tenth annual Award for Excellence in the Arts to Donald Kuspit, on February 15th at the Lotos Club in New York City. The award recognizes individuals who have made significant contributions to the arts and society, furthering our understanding of how the arts inspire personal growth, responsibility and a sense of civic participation.
Donald Kuspit, distinguished professor of art history and philosophy at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, is a contributing editor at Artforum, Sculpture and New Art Examiner magazines, the editor of Art Criticism and the editor of a series on American Art and Art Criticism for Cambridge University Press. Winner of the prestigious Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism (1983), given by the College Art Association, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Contribution to Visual Arts from the National Association of Schools of Art and Design in 1997 and has been awarded fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. He is editorial advisor for European art 1900–50 for the new Encyclopedia Britannica (16th edition) and contributed the entry on Art Criticism. Kuspit has written more than twenty books, including Redeeming Art: Critical Reveries (2000), Idiosyncratic Identities: Artists at the End of the Avant-Garde (1996), The Rebirth of Painting in the Late 20th Century (2000), Psychostrategies of Avant-Garde Art (2000) and The End of Art (2004), as well as numerous articles and three books of poetry. He lives in New York City.
Kupsit, long an insightful critic of podstmodernism, has become a champion of the return to beauty, craftsmanship and humanistic values in the arts.
The previous recipients of the Award for Excellence in the Arts are Robert Fagles, translator (2007); Alvin Holm, architect (2006); Burton Silverman, painter (2005); William H. Gerdts, art historian (2004); Henry Hope Reed, architectural historian (2003); Rev. Dr. Victoria R. Sirota, musician (2002); Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, scholar of religion and the arts (2000); Frank Mason, painter (1999); Frederick Hart, sculptor (1998).

The Newington-Cropsey Cultural Studies Center was established in 1990 by   The Newington-Cropsey Foundation as an interdisciplinary educational resource for art and ideas. The Center is dedicated to the principle that the arts help shape our world, from our cultural perceptions to the physical experience of our communal space.