The Pulitzer Prize for Criticism has been presented since 1970 to a newspaper writer in the United States who has demonstrated 'distinguished criticism'. Recipients of the award are chosen by an independent board and officially administered by Columbia University. The Pulitzer Committee issues an official citation explaining the reasons for the award.
Michael Max Asher was a conceptual artist, described by The New York Times as "among the patron saints of the Conceptual Art phylum known as Institutional Critique, an often esoteric dissection of the assumptions that govern how we perceive art." Rather than designing new art objects, Asher typically altered the existing environment, by repositioning or removing artworks, walls, facades, etc.
The Los Angeles Times, abbreviated as LA Times, is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the Los Angeles suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the United States. The publication has won more than 40 Pulitzer Prizes. It is owned by Patrick Soon-Shiong and published by the Times Mirror Company. The newspaper's coverage has evolved more recently away from U.S. and international headlines and toward emphasizing California and especially Southern California stories.
Marilynne Summers Robinson is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.
William Anthony Auth Jr. was an American editorial cartoonist and children's book illustrator. Auth is best known for his syndicated work originally drawn for The Philadelphia Inquirer, for whom he worked from 1971 to 2012. Auth's art won the cartoonist the Pulitzer Prize in 1976 and the Herblock Prize in 2005.
Ada Louise Huxtable was an architecture critic and writer on architecture. Huxtable established architecture and urban design journalism in North America and raised the public's awareness of the urban environment. In 1970, she was awarded the first ever Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. In 1981, she was named a MacArthur Fellow. Architecture critic Paul Goldberger, also a Pulitzer Prize-winner (1984) for architectural criticism, said in 1996: "Before Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture was not a part of the public dialogue." "She was a great lover of cities, a great preservationist and the central planet around which every other critic revolved," said architect Robert A. M. Stern, dean of the Yale University School of Architecture.
Benjamin S. Lerner is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. He has been a Fulbright Scholar, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Howard Foundation Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a MacArthur Fellow, among other honors. In 2011 he won the "Preis der Stadt Münster für internationale Poesie", the first American to receive the honor. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016.
Raymond Saunders is an American artist known for his multimedia paintings which often have sociopolitical undertones, and which incorporate assemblage, drawing, collage and found text. Saunders is also recognized for his installation, sculpture, and curatorial work.
Charles Desmarais is the Art Critic for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Marcia Tucker was an American art historian, art critic and curator. In 1977 she founded the New Museum of Contemporary Art, a museum dedicated to innovative art and artistic practice in New York City, which she ran as the director until 1999.
Lucy Rowland Lippard is an American writer, art critic, activist, and curator. Lippard was among the first writers to argue for the "dematerialization" at work in conceptual art and was an early champion of feminist art. She is the author of 21 books on contemporary art and has received numerous awards and accolades from literary critics and art associations.
Hilton Als is an American writer and theater critic. He is a teaching professor at the University of California, Berkeley, an associate professor of writing at Columbia University and a staff writer and theater critic for The New Yorker magazine. He is a former staff writer for The Village Voice and former editor-at-large at Vibe magazine.
Kenneth Tucker is an American arts, music and television critic, magazine editor, and non-fiction book writer.
Peter Plagens is an American artist, art critic, and novelist based in New York City. He is most widely known for his longstanding contributions to Artforum and Newsweek, and for what critics have called a remarkably consistent, five-decade-long body of abstract formalist painting. Plagens has written three books on art, Bruce Nauman: The True Artist (2014), Moonlight Blues: An Artist's Art Criticism (1986) and Sunshine Muse: Modern Art on the West Coast, 1945-70 (1974), and two novels, The Art Critic (2008) and Time for Robo (1999). He has been awarded major fellowships for both his painting and his writing. Plagens's work has been featured in surveys at the Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Whitney Museum, and PS1, and in solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Las Vegas Art Museum. In 2004, the USC Fisher Gallery organized and held a 30-year traveling retrospective of his work. Critics have contrasted the purely visual dialogue his art creates—often generating more questions than answers—with the directness of his writing; they also contend that the visibility of his bylines as a critic has sometimes overshadowed his artmaking—unduly. Los Angeles Times critic David Pagel described Plagens's painting as a "fusion of high-flying refinement and everyday awkwardness" with an intellectual savvy, disdain for snobbery and ungainliness he likened to Willem de Kooning's work. Reviewing Plagens's 2018 exhibition, New York Times critic Roberta Smith called the show an "eye-teasing sandwich of contrasting formalist strategies," the hard-won result of a decade of focused experimentation.
Ticio Escobar is a Paraguayan lawyer, academic, author, museum director, and former Minister of Culture of Paraguay. He has championed the rights of Indigenous peoples of Paraguay, writing about and curating shows on the topic.
Paul Schimmel is an American curator of contemporary art based in Los Angeles. Schimmel served as the chief curator of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), from 1990 until 2012, where he organized numerous exhibitions. From 2013 through 2017, he was a vice president and partner with the art gallery Hauser & Wirth and co-founder of Hauser Wirth & Schimmel in Los Angeles. In late February 2017, Schimmel departed from the Hauser & Wirth enterprise, including Hauser Wirth & Schimmel in Los Angeles, with no public comment on his behalf.
Garth Clark is an art critic, art historian, curator, gallerist, and art dealer from Pretoria, South Africa.
Doug Harvey is an artist, curator and writer based in Los Angeles. For 15 years he was a freelance arts writer and Lead Art Critic for LA Weekly and during his tenure there was considered “one of the most important voices on art in the city” by editor Tom Christie, "an art critic who is read all over the country, is smart, snappy, original, has an independent open eye, a quick wit, is not boring and never academic" by New York Magazine critic Jerry Saltz, and "a master of the unexpected chain-reaction of thought" by Pulitzer Prize winning LA Times critic Christopher Knight.
Elizabeth Armstrong is an American curator of contemporary and modern art. Beginning in the late 1980s, she served in chief curatorial and leadership roles at the Walker Art Center, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA), Minneapolis Institute of Arts and Palm Springs Art Museum. She has organized numerous touring exhibitions and catalogues that gained national and international attention; among the best known are: "In the Spirit of Fluxus", "Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art", and "Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury". She is also known for organizing three California Biennials (2002–6) and notable exhibitions of David Reed and Mary Heilmann. Armstrong's curatorial work and publications have been recognized by the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Center for Curatorial Leadership, the Getty Foundation Pacific Standard Time project and the National Endowment for the Arts, among other organizations.
Mark Swed is an American music critic who specializes in classical music. Since 1996 he has been the chief classical music critic of the Los Angeles Times where his writings have made him a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Prior to his LA Times post, Swed was the chief music critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and The Wall Street Journal, and has contributed other writings to a variety of publications including The Orchestra, an iPad application. He has a particular interest in contemporary classical music.
