Artfully Won
Meadows Prize winners Nadia Sirota and Tania Bruguera are on a mission
Since the re-boot of the Meadows Prize in 2009, those awarded the honor have produced
pioneering work ranging from a thought-provoking report on the local arts community
to a choreographic premiere featuring dancers splashed in paint and an urban take on
a classic fairytale. This year’s winners are no different, promising bold, visionary work and
a lasting impact on Meadows students and the Dallas arts community.
When violist Nadia Sirota (opposite above)
visited SMU Meadows School of the Arts
last fall, she told faculty that as one of two
winners of the Meadows Prize for 2013, she
is looking forward to working with students
on techniques and ideas for broadening their
career options as professional musicians.
“I want to help students feel comfortable with
the concept of working with living composers
and to understand the value of modern music,”
says Sirota, a classically trained musician
who champions new music around the world
and who has been praised by The New York
Times as “a bold new music interpreter.”
The 2013 Meadows Prize was also awarded to
Tania Bruguera (opposite below), a socio-political
artist and activist from Cuba whose work
focuses on social/public art practice. She is
the driving force behind Immigrant Movement
International, a project in Queens, N.Y., offering
free educational, artistic and consciousnessraising
activities to a community of immigrants.
“Tania is a visionary artist who has inventively
engaged social and political content,”
says Noah Simblist, associate professor of art
at Meadows. “Rather than using artwork as
a soothing device to decorate the spaces that
we live and work in, she uses art as a way of
reckoning with issues we would rather ignore,
and calls attention to a wide range of pressing
problems that need a second look.”
“Both artists have successfully forged nontraditional
paths in their disciplines,” says
Meadows Dean José Bowen. “Nadia is a new
music pioneer and Tania is an outstanding
example of how artists can engage with
their cities and communities. They will be an
inspiration to the students at Meadows, who
are exploring ways to make a living from their
creativity and find their voices as artists.”
Inaugurated in October 2009, the Meadows
Prize is presented by SMU Meadows each
year to two pioneering artists. Sponsored by
The Meadows Foundation, the prize includes
support for a four-week residency in Dallas,
in addition to a $25,000 stipend. In return,
recipients are expected to interact in a substantive
way with Meadows students and
collaborating arts organizations and to leave
a lasting legacy in Dallas, such as a work of art
that remains in the community, a composition
or piece of dramatic writing that would
be performed locally or a new way of teaching
in a particular discipline.
The Classically Trained, Contemporary
Music Advocate
Sirota, who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from
Juilliard, is a highly sought-after violist known for her
compelling energy and unique interpretation of new scores.
She has commissioned and premiered works by some of
the most talented composers of her generation, including
Marcos Balter, Caleb Burhans, Judd Greenstein, Missy
Mazzoli and Nico Muhly. Her debut album, First Things
First, was a New York Times 2009 record of the year. She
also has collaborated with major classical artists, songwriters
and bands worldwide, and on such recordings as Arcade
Fire’s Grammy-winning album The Suburbs.
Sirota will undertake the first half of her Meadows Prize
residency April 1-14 and return October 7-19.
During an introductory visit to Meadows in early November,
she conducted a master class and coaching sessions
with two chamber music groups, met with Dean Bowen and
discussed ideas for her residency with faculty members.
She said she was especially happy to win the prize because
it would give her time to slow down and think about her
career and what she has learned that might be useful for
Meadows students.
“I’m hoping to bring my ensemble yMusic to SMU to work
with student composers and performers, and I want to show
students how to incorporate audio equipment and electronics
into their arsenal of techniques for playing orchestral instruments,”
she says. “These are some of the things I picked
up in my career after college – I’d love to help students think
about them as integral parts of the experience of being a
professional musician as well. It’s an exciting time for the
new music that’s being created – I hope students get from my
residency that there’s a lot to take in and a lot to work with.”
Sirota maintains an extremely busy schedule, performing,
recording and working with other musicians around the
world, including 12 visits to Iceland in the past 18 months.
She is a regular guest with such groups as The Meredith
Monk Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound and Continuum, and
is a founding member of ACME (the American Contemporary
Music Ensemble), yMusic and the Wordless Music
Orchestra.
During her residency, she will give two public performances
in April in Caruth Auditorium: a concert with the Meadows
new music ensemble SYZYGY on April 12 and a solo performance
of music from her new CD Baroque on April 14.
Matt Albert, who won the Meadows Prize in
2010 as a member of the Grammy-winning
new music ensemble eighth blackbird and is
now artist-in-residence with the Meadows
Division of Music, has known Sirota for the
past five years.
“I think she’s an extremely exciting choice
for the Meadows Prize,” says Albert. “The
Meadows Prize is about recognizing people
who are coming into a major career, and that’s
just where Nadia is. She’s made great choices
to take advantage of opportunities she’s been
given and to stand out from the crowd while
building on a foundation of solid conservatory
training. That’s exactly the example we want
to show to our students.”
Addressing Uncomfortable
Issues Through Art
As an interdisciplinary artist, Tania Bruguera
works primarily in behavior art, performance,
installation and video. She has “eaten dirt,
hung a dead lamb from her neck and served
trays of cocaine to a gallery audience, all in
the name of art,” according to The New York
Times. Her work has been featured in the
Venice, Johannesburg, São Paolo, Shanghai
and Havana biennials and in exhibitions at
some of the most prominent museums in
Europe and the U.S., including the Tate
Modern, IVAM and The New Museum of
Contemporary Art, and is part of numerous
art collections.
Bruguera is a graduate of the M.F.A. program at
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and
of the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana,
Cuba, where she founded and directed Arte de
Conducta, the first political art studies program
in the world. She has been honored with a
Guggenheim Fellowship (1998) and the Prince
Claus Prize from The Netherlands (2000).
Currently she is a visiting faculty member at
the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the IUAV in
Venice and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.
Bruguera grew up in Cuba, and much of her
art has political overtones. At the Havana
Biennale in 2000, she had visitors walk over
rotting sugar cane husks to reach a video
showing historical clips of Fidel Castro; in
front of the video naked men performed gestures
of subjugation.
“I work with fear, vulnerability, empowerment,
self-determination and freedom as
well as submission and obedience as social
survival strategies,” she says. “These tools and
evidences are part of the process of resistance
to entrenched power. I’m interested in human
transformation as part and consequence of a
relationship with power.”
In March 2011, Bruguera began a five-year
social project, Immigrant Movement International,
the first year of which was sponsored
by the Queens Museum of Art and former
Meadows Prize-winning public art organization
Creative Time. Engaging both local and international communities, and working with
social service organizations, elected officials
and artists focused on immigration reform,
IM International functions as a think tank for
immigrant issues.
For the first 18 months of the project, Bruguera
lived on minimum wage in a small apartment
with a group of recently arrived, undocumented
immigrants in the multinational neighborhood
of Corona, Queens. The apartment sits over a
storefront where IM International staff and
volunteers offer free services to the community,
including legal advice, computer classes
and English tutoring as well as art and theatre
workshops. One of the goals of the project is
to raise awareness through what Bruguera
calls “useful art,” meaning implementing art
in people’s lives in ways that address social
and political problems. For example, in one
performance art piece, volunteers interviewed
immigrants in the subway about their experiences
in the U.S.
David Strauss, director of external affairs at
the Queens Museum of Art, says the concept
of useful art is also behind a new project
launched in February 2013 by Bruguera and
the Queens Museum, together with the Van
Abbemuseum in the Netherlands. The project
will include research, an online platform, an
association of useful art practitioners, a series
of public projects and a lab presentation at the
Queens Museum, culminating in the transformation
of the old building of the Van Abbemuseum
into the Museum of Arte Útil in the fall
of 2013 and a publication.
“The Museum of Arte Útil will build on Tania’s
decade of research into socially informed
art practice that emphasizes effectiveness and
implementation over representation,” says
Strauss. “A survey of past and present projects
will be included that meet the criteria for useful
art: projects that propose new uses for art
within society, are implemented and function
in real situations, and have practical, beneficial
outcomes for users, among other goals.”
Bruguera’s Meadows Prize residency will take
place April 7-20 and September 22-October 5.
The April visit will focus on work with students;
the fall visit will include a major public
event the week of September 30.
“The Meadows Prize is bringing artists to
Dallas who are looking at things in very new
ways,” says Dean Bowen. “These artists take
risks and rethink conventions. Our state has
always attracted people willing to take risks –
the oil industry is a classic example – and has
benefited from their successes. In the artistic
process, just as in oil exploration, you have to
drill some dry wells to find the gushers.
“The more we can connect our students and
community with innovative thinkers, the more
we hope to spark creative, entrepreneurial
ideas that ultimately benefit both Dallas and
our next generation of leaders.”