MassArt is pleased to announce that the college’s president, Dr. Katherine Sloan, and its director of public art and former director of exhibitions, Jeffrey Keough, have each been awarded Distinguished Service to the Art Community awards by the New England Chapter of the United States Section of the International Association of Art Critics. They were honored at the 2008 AICA New England awards ceremony, which was held on Wednesday, February 27, 2008, at the Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Each year the United States Section of the International Association of Art Critics invites its nearly 400 members to vote for the best exhibitions created during that season as a way to acknowledge the exceptional work contributed by artists, curators, and dealers in the field of the visual arts. These prestigious annual awards are the art-world’s equivalent to those given each year by the New York Film Critics Society, the Drama Desk and the Academy of Motion Pictures. Additionally, for the past six years, the New England chapter of AICA has initiated its own awards ceremony to honor local efforts, which are also announced at the National AICA/USA awards ceremony to be held on March 17, 2008, 6:00pm, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Dr. Katherine Sloan was honored by AICA New England for her leadership and vision in expanding MassArt’s influence by strengthening the college’s commitment to the community, expanding its role in shaping visual art and design education on the local, regional and national levels, and becoming a tireless champion of New England’s creative economy and its critical role in the state. Dr. Sloan has been president of Massachusetts College of Art and Design since 1996, when she was appointed the tenth president of the college and the first woman to hold the position in the institution’s 135-year history.
Jeffrey Keough was honored for his achievements during the two decades he was director of exhibitions at the college. During that time, Keough curated and directed many regional, national, and international exhibitions touching on a wide variety of subjects and themes such as Australian Aboriginal prints, international photojournalism, Russian graphic design, Dutch ceramics, art in reaction to AIDS, drawings and artifacts from the Holocaust, murals from Hiroshima, Mexican photography, and new art from Cuba, to name a few. He has curated one person shows by artists Polly Apfelbaum, Xu Bing, Abelardo Morell, George Nick, Nicholas Nixon, Kiki Smith, William Wegman, Sam Durant, Richard Yarde, and group shows have included artists Tony Oursler, Janine Antoni, Vik Muniz, Petah Coyne, James Casabere, and Barbara Bosworth. Many of these exhibitions have garnered critical acclaim and have traveled nationally. He has served on a number of prestigious juries and has selected artworks for public display in the city of Cambridge, in the city of Boston, and at Logan International Airport. He also directed Boston’s Cavalcade of Cod, part of the city’s millennium celebration.
