Artes Mundi winner splits prize money - Museums Association

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Artes Mundi winner splits prize money

Theaster Gates shares £40,000 award with fellow nominees
Gary Noakes
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An “incredibly close” competition for the 2015 Artes Mundi award saw the winner Theaster Gates split his £40,000 prize among the other eight shortlisted candidates.

Karen MacKinnon, the director of Artes Mundi, said Gates’s work had a special relevance at the moment.

The Chicago-based artist's winning installation, entitled A Complicated Relationship between Heaven and Earth, or When We Believe (2014), challenges a western-centric ideology of Christianity that he believes marginalises other religious traditions.

The decision by Gates to split the prize followed a discussion earlier in the day at the Artes Mundi conference between Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, two artists nominated jointly for their work together, where they talked about the importance and merit of art prizes and what the money should be used for.

It is thought to be the first time that a major British art prize has been split between finalists. Gates has also won praise for funding urban renewal through the sale of his work in deprived areas of Chicago, St Louis and Omaha.

His winning work is a series of symbolic objects used as vehicles for religious transcendence across the globe, including a Malines Boli, or bull sculpture, used to deter bad spirits and protect crops in Africa; a revolving, early 20th-century goat riding tricycle used in American Masonic initiation ceremonies; and slates from the roof of Chicago’s demolished St Laurence church, a local landmark of white catholic and black protestant tensions.

The Artes Mundi prize is funded by the Arts Council of Wales and Cardiff City Council, with other contributors including the Colwinston Charitable Trust, the Waterloo Foundation and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.



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