The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston has announced Sarah Sze as the first recipient of its newly established Meraki Artist Award. Funded by collector Fotene Demoulas, the $100,000 prize is to be given annually in recognition of the work and impact of contemporary women artists. Sze will receive the accolade at the ICA Boston’s annual Women’s Luncheon, to be held May 5.

“It’s a huge honor to be the first recipient of the Meraki Artist Award and I’m inspired by the dedication to love, care, and art that the award stands for,” said Sze in a statement.

The award, which Demoulas has promised to fund for the next ten years, reflects the museum’s commitment to elevating work by women artists. „Meraki“ in Greek refers to soul, love, and creativity.

“I am honored to collaborate with the ICA to spotlight the passion and presence that women visual artists bring to their practice through the Meraki Artist Award,” said Demoulas in a statement. “I want to offer heartfelt congratulations to Sarah, whose innovate work inspires us to see the world in new ways.”

“The generosity of this award is echoed in the open spirit and artistic expansiveness of Sarah’s work,” said ICA Boston director Jill Medvedow in a statement. “We are thrilled to recognize Sarah as the inaugural recipient of the Meraki Artist Award and to celebrate her important contributions to art and culture.”

Born in Boston in 1969, Sze is known for incorporating everyday materials into her practice, in which she blends the physical and the digital to investigate the themes of information, technology, memory, entropy, and time. Her oeuvre includes painting, sculpture, video, and installation. Despite their frequently monumental size, her works are typically quite intimate, beckoning the viewer to take a closer look. Among her works are 1999’s „Many a Slip“, an immersive multi-room installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago featuring assemblages of mundane objects interspersed with flickering projections; „Things Fall Apart“, a 2001 installation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art featuring a disassembled car tumbling through space; and „Fallen Sky“, 2021, a massive fragmented circle of mirrored stainless steel lying peacefully in the grass at New York’s Storm King Art Center. Sze represented the United States in the Fifty-Fifth Venice Biennale in 2013, and her work was featured in the 1999 Carnegie International, the 2000 Whitney Biennial, and the 2002 Bienal de São Paulo. Among her recent solo exhibitions are those at Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2024); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2023); and Fondation Cartier, Paris (2020). Sze holds a BA from Yale University and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003.



Image: Portrait of Sarah Sze, 2021, Courtesy: the artist, Artforum, photo: Deborah Feingold.