Mar 8, 2018 | 4th Annual GFAA Award Ceremony & Gala

The 4th Annual GFAA Award Ceremony and Gala

Congratulations to all 85 Nominees!

Mar 8, 2018

The Global Fine Art Awards (GFAA) celebrates art and culture by honoring this year’s 85 Nominees and crowning the 15 Award Winners today.

The 4th Annual GFAA Award Ceremony was held on March 8, 2018 at the historic 583 Park Ave, preceded by a series of educational panels in the morning and a hosted after-party where guests danced the night away at the National Arts Club.

The ceremony was presided over by the GFAA Advisory Board and Judges – Founder and President, Judy Holm; Advisory Board Chair Lawrence Shindell; and Honorary Chair Hedva Ser, Paris-based UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador and Special Envoy for cultural diplomacy, promoting cultural diversity, intercultural dialogue and a culture of peace through art. The master of ceremonies was Peter Trippi, member of the GFAA Executive Committee, and Judge Emeritus. Trippi is editor-in-chief of Fine Art Connoisseur magazine.

GFAA Judges selected 13 Winners – one in each of the following award categories: Contemporary and Post-War- solo artist; Contemporary and Post-War- group or theme; Impressionist and Modern- solo artist; Impressionist and Modern- group or theme; Renaissance, Baroque, Old Masters and Dynasties- solo artist; Renaissance, Baroque, Old Masters and Dynasties- group or theme; Ancient Art; Photography; Design; Fringe; Public Art, and the new awards that premiered  – Global Planet and Global Humanity. Youniversal, and YOU-2 are the two final awards, are given to the most popular nominees, and are selected by public voting on the GFAA website and social media.

The GFAA program highlights the link between artists and their creations, the galleries that represent them, curated shows from the gallery, public art and museum worlds. Eleven galleries exhibiting at the Armory Show, a cultural collaborator of GFAA, represented more than fifteen 2017 GFAA Nominees including: Yayoi Kusama, Kerry James Marshall, Andy Goldsworthy, Jaume Plensa, Ana Mendieta, Wifredo Lam, Alexander Calder, Pablo Picasso, Irving Penn, Ai Weiwei and William Eggleston.

The events were attended by over 200 guests, including fifty VIPs, representing more than thirty Nominees included Shirin Neshat, Winner of the premier Global Humanity Award, accompanied by her family and Miciah Hussey and Caroline Luce, representatives from the Gladstone Gallery; Galerie Lelong & Co. Director Mary Sabbatino, proxy for three nominated artists represented by the gallery –  Winner Andy Goldsworthy for the first Global Planet Award; past GFAA Winner for Public Art (2015) and 2017 Global Humanity Award Nominee Jaume Plensa, and the late Ana Mendieta, also nominated for Global Humanity for her lifetime of work. Sabbatino was accompanied by Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, niece and film archivist of Ana Mendieta.

Jay Levenson, Director of the International Program at The Museum of Modern Art also attended with MoMA’s winning exhibition co-curator Jennifer Gray, for GFAA Best Design 2017, Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive

Melissa Chiu, director of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, accepted the Award for  Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors.

Slater B. Bradley, Nominated for Best Public Art Award for his Venice Biennale collateral installation Slater B. Bradley: Sundoor at World’s End, attended with Chloe Sevigny. Bradley has been featured in solo exhibitions at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York (2000), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2005), among many others.

Farideh Lashai: When I Count, There Are Only You… But When I Look, There Is Only a Shadow, from the Museo Nacional Del Prado, in collaboration with the British Museum, received Honorable Mention for GFAA’s Fringe Award.  Traveling from Madrid to receive the Award, was curator Ana Martínez de Aguilar.  The late artist’s daughter, Maneli Keykavoussi, head of the Farideh Lashai Foundation, Edward Tyler Nahem gallerists Paloma Martin Llopis and Gallerist Leila Heller were also in attendance, honoring Lashai’s last work.

Additional Nominees at the event included Museum Director and curator Erlend Hoyersten and curator Jacob Vengberg Sevel, Winners of Best Public Art Award for the Triennial THE GARDEN – End of Times; Beginning of Times, at ARos Aarhus Kunstmuseum; The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Winners Dr. Maxwell (Mike) K. Hearn, Douglas Dillon Chairman of Asian Art, and Dr. Jason Sun, Brooke Russell Astor Curator of Chinese Art- for Age of Empires: Chinese Art of the Qin and Han Dynasties (221 B.C-A.D 220) ; Getty Museum Winners, Co-Curators Dr. Kristen Collins and Dr. Kenneth Lapatin for their exhibition Remembering Antiquity: The Ancient World through Medieval Eyes ; April Moorhouse, Head of Membership & Programmes, Royal Academy America accepted two awards on behalf of the Museum – Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932  and Abstract Expressionism.

Many other Nominees and Award Winners attended the ceremony including Lisa Ziviello, Director of Marketing from the International Center of Photography (ICP), whose Perpetual Revolution: The Image and Social Change exhibition won for Best Photography Award; Asia Society’s Shayne Doty, Managing Director for Philanthropy, Nominated for Secrets of the Sea: A Tang Shipwreck and Early Trade in Asia; Winner Dr. Catherine Whistler, Curator from the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University for Raphael: The Drawings; Diane Tuft, Nominated photographer for the show Arctic Melt, with gallerists from Marlborough Gallery in New York; Tamara Chalabi and Paolo Columbo, Ruya Foundation’s Directors and Co-Curators of the Iraq Pavilion from the Venice Biennale which was a Finalist for the Best Public Art Award; London-based Global Humanity Nominee Baiqu Gonkar, Director and Curator of Art Represent, who was also a Panelist earlier in the morning.

Kris Callens, Director of the Fries Museum (Netherlands), which organized the Lawrence Alma-Tadema exhibition seen at three museums across Europe- which received Honorable Mention for the Youniversal Award, and Winner of YOU-2, the two public Awards. Amalia Cosmetatou, Executive Director and Director of Cultural Affairs and Roberta Casagrande-Kim, Assistant Manager of Exhibitions and Publications of the Onassis Foundation USA, representing nominated exhibition A World of Emotions: Ancient Greece, 700 BC – 200 AD , were honored by the presence of a number of colleagues. Their exhibition was crowned the Youniversal Award winner, after receiving the highest number of votes in the four-year history of the Award.

Susie Guzman, Director at Hauser & Wirth for Nominees Philip Guston, Lygia Pape and Hans Arp, and representatives from David Zwirner and Levy Gorvy also attended in support of their artists.

Thank you to our partners and sponsors!

2018 Corporate Sponsors

Crowell & Moring LLP, Ironhorse Vineyards, Eli Klein Gallery,  Liberty International Underwriters, a member of Liberty Mutual Insurance, SRI Fine Art Services , Wiggin and Dana LLP

2018 Corporate Partners

Providing pro bono Public Relations – Copperfield Advisory

Cultural Collaborators and Media Partners 

ART MEDIA Holdings (Art in America, ARTnews Magazine, The Magazine ANTIQUES and MODERN), The Armory Show, Alserkal Avenue (Dubai), American Alliance of Museums (AAM), Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), De la Cruz Collection (Miami), DSL Collection (Paris), Edward Tyler Nahem Gallery, Family Office Elite magazine, Fine Art Connoisseur magazine, Fractured Atlas, Galerie Lelong & Co., Gladstone Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Leighton House Museum (London), Leila Heller Gallery (New York and Dubai), Mapme, Marlborough Gallery, Masterpiece London, National Arts Club, Onassis Foundation USA, Traveling Exhibits Network, Vastari, White Rabbit Collection (Sydney)