Two current and one former MIT staffers are among the 10 Boston winners of Artadia Awards, selected by three nationally prominent curators. The winners were selected through studio visits this month.
John Osorio-Buck, curatorial assistant at List Visual Arts Center, is one of seven $1,500 prize winners. Osorio-Buck encourages his audience to think outside the norms towards positive change. He employs the complex concept of "utopia" as the foil in his work. He has developed pirate radio stations, mobile urban shelters, rafts and temporary structures to engage a broad audience and encourage dialogue about sustainable living and societal inequities.
Andi Sutton, program coordinator for the Graduate Consortium of Women's Studies, is a member of an artist collective that won one of three $15,000 Artadia Awards. The National Bitter Melon Council (NBMC) is an artist collective that creates interactive public events that incorporate performance art and community development/activist practices. The NBMC was conceived in 2004 and stages events that use the foreignness of bitter melon and the concept of the flavor of "bitter" (which is also an emotion) to investigate situations that through bitterness create and promote an alternative basis for community and engagement.
Hiroko Kikuchi, former List Visual Arts Center education and outreach coordinator, is also a member of the NBMC and an award -recipient.
Junot Diaz, associate professor in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, has been awarded a Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The fellowship provides a one-year residence at the American Academy in Rome. The award was presented May 16 in New York.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on May 23, 2007 (download PDF).
