10/1/15 Announcing the 28 Global Fine Art Award Finalists, launching the Youniversal Award.

10/1/15 Announcing the 28 Global Fine Art Award Finalists, launching the Youniversal Award.

As covered in the Miami Herald 10/1/15 

Twenty-eight of the best exhibitions produced around the world during the past year were selected by a prestigious jury of art professionals today.  All Nominees for the eight Global Fine Art Awards (GFAA) will be honored at the award ceremony on Monday, November 30, 2015 in the historic Freedom Tower at Miami Dade College.

While the Jury votes to award the winners in each of the eight categories, the public will vote for their favorite exhibition to select the best exhibition of the year.  The Youniversal Award, based on cumulative popular votes, is the ninth and final award in the program, and will also be announced at the live ceremony event. Online voting starts October 15 and continues through November 1, 2015.

Nominees and Finalists include exhibitions from many of the most important museums in the world: The Whitney, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; LACMA and The J. Paul Getty Museum in LA; Seattle, and Philadelphia Museums of Art; The British Museum, Tate Britain and Tate Modern, London; The Louvre, Le Grand Palais and Le Petit Palais in Paris; the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, The State Hermitage and the Moscow Kremlin in Russia.

Peter Trippi, Editor in Chief of Fine Art Connoisseur magazine and GFAA Judge, says,

“Consider how hard art museum professionals work to conceive and organize their temporary exhibitions and installations of art and design, and also how much money their institutions spend to mount and tour them.  Now ask yourself: how are the best of these projects honored, after the lights have dimmed and the loaned artworks have headed home? 

Oddly, in a world teeming with award ceremonies for seemingly every possible artistic activity, there is no program that recognizes such exhibitions.”

This award program features some of the most innovative, important and thought-provoking public works of art as well, such as the Anish Kapoor installation at Chateau de Versailles, “Frida Kahlo: Art*Garden*Life” staged in the New York Botanical Garden and three nominees from the Venice Biennale 2015- by artists Chiharu Shiota, Sarah Sze and Jaume Plensa.

The GFAA Jury recognizes exhibitions from museums, private collections and galleries of renowned artists and designers spanning the history of time.  Artists range from contemporary and modern artists- On Kawara, Agnes Martin, Shirin Neshat, Sol Lewitt, Arne Quinze, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, to renaissance and masters- del Sarto, da Vinci, Rubens, Velazquez, and Rembrandt.

Themed and sweeping period shows are well represented, with “Sultans of Deccan India, 1500-1700: Opulence and Fantasy” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Ming: 50 years that changed China” at The British Museum, “Ireland: Crossroads of Art and Design 1690-1840” at the Art Institute Chicago and two major shows on Impressionism- The Artist’s Garden: “Impressionism and the Garden Movement,” The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; and “Discovering the Impressionists: Paul Durand-Ruel and the New Painting,” at Philadelphia Museum of Art, and earlier in the year at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris and in London’s National Gallery.

The GFAA Finalists

To showcase the exhibitions of each of the 28 finalists, an original video is created by GFAA. The videos, paired with curated music, are presented live at the award ceremony.