Colombian Immigrant Carlos Motta Wins Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise

The Vilcek Foundation is proud to announce Carlos Motta as one of the three recipients of the 2017 Vilcek Prizes for Creative Promise in Fine Arts.  The prizes were designed to recognize and support emerging immigrant artists who have made outstanding contributions to American society, and include a cash prize of $50,000.  Mr. Motta is originally from Bogota, Colombia.

Carlos Motta works in a variety of media—including video, performance, photography, and sculpture—to explore questions of identity, sexuality and politics, and to identify and dissect the relations between an individual and the culture that forms them.  Since moving to the United States in 1996, Motta has become interested in questions of representation and the experience of democracy; the emotional underpinnings of political awareness; and the ways that dominant accounts of history have become biased.  Motta has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Future Generation Art Prize from PinchukArtCentre, and grants from Creative Capital and New York State Council on the Arts, and his work has been shown at the Perez Art Museum Miami, The Tanks at Tate Modern, and at MoMA/PS1. Motta was born in Colombia.

The prizewinners were selected by panels of experts in a variety of artistic disciplines. The jury panel for the Vilcek Prizes for Creative Promise in Fine Arts included Nicholas Baume, director and chief curator of the Public Art Fund; Naomi Beckwith, curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Rita Gonzalez, associate curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hitomi Iwasaki, director of exhibitions/curator at the Queens Museum of Art; and Thomas J. Lax, associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art.

All prizewinners will be honored at a ceremony in New York City in April 2017. In addition to prizes in fine arts, the Vilcek Foundation is also recognizing immigrants in the sciences with the 2017 Vilcek Prizes in Biomedical Science.

The Vilcek Foundation was established in 2000 by Jan and Marica Vilcek, immigrants from the former Czechoslovakia. The mission of the foundation, to honor the contributions of immigrants to the United States and to foster appreciation of the arts and sciences, was inspired by the couple’s respective careers in biomedical science and art history, as well as their personal experiences and appreciation for the opportunities they received as newcomers to this country. The foundation awards annual prizes to prominent immigrant biomedical scientists and artists, and manages the Vilcek Foundation Art Collections, a promised gift from its founders.

To learn more about the Vilcek Foundation, please visit Vilcek.org.

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