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The SECA Art Award is a contemporary art award program that has been organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and supported by its auxiliary SECA (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art) since 1967 to honor San Francisco Bay Area artists. It includes an SFMoMA exhibition, an accompanying catalogue, and a modest cash prize. The SECA Art Award distinguishes “artists working independently at a high level of artistic maturity whose work has not, at the time of recommendation, received substantial recognition." [1]
Currently, the SECA Art Award exhibition occurs biennially. Two SFMoMA assistant curators make the selection of finalists and award winners and co-organize the SECA Art Award exhibition.
The high-profile, ongoing exhibition series often provides artists with their first major exposure at a large institution. A number of past Art Award recipients and finalists are represented in SFMoMA's permanent collection and have been included in collection-based presentations.
SECA (also known as, the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art) group was originally founded in 1961 as an auxiliary of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in order to find young artists. [2] The art interest group brings together collectors, curators, arts professionals, and artists through a variety of events that strengthen members' knowledge of contemporary art and appreciation of the local art community. [3] [4] By 1976, the SECA group began awarding prizes. Winning the award gives professional recognition to San Francisco Bay Area artists and allows them to secure funds for a new commission and an exhibition at SFMOMA. [4]
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art, and was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th-century art. The museum's current collection includes over 33,000 works of painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, design, and media arts, and moving into the 21st century. The collection is displayed in 170,000 square feet (16,000 m2) of exhibition space, making the museum one of the largest in the United States overall, and one of the largest in the world for modern and contemporary art.
Rigo 23 is a Portuguese-born American muralist, painter, and political artist. He is known in the San Francisco community for having painted a number of large, graphic "sign" murals including: One Tree next to the U.S. Route 101 on-ramp at 10th and Bryant Street, Innercity Home on a large public housing structure, Sky/Ground on a tall abandoned building at 3rd and Mission Street, and Extinct over a Shell gas station. He resides in San Francisco, California.
Amy Franceschini is a contemporary American artist and designer. Her practice spans a broad range of media including drawing, sculpture, design, net art, public art and gardening. She was a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow. Franceschini in 2009 was also a recipient of the Creative Capital Award in the discipline of Emerging Fields.
Squeak Carnwath is an American contemporary painter and arts educator. She is a professor emerita of art at the University of California, Berkeley. She has a studio in Oakland, California, where she has lived and worked since 1970.
Maria Porges is an American artist and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. As an artist she is known for the prominent use of text in her visual works, which encompass sculpture, works on paper and assemblage and have an epistemological bent. As a critic Porges has written for Artforum, Art in America, Sculpture and SquareCylinder, among other publications.
Zarouhie Abdalian is an American artist of Armenian descent, known for site-specific sculptures and installations.
Desirée Holman (born 1974) is an American artist who is based in the Bay Area, California.
Mitzi Pederson is an American artist specializing in abstract sculptural work. Pederson is known for her use of ordinary household, construction, and building materials to explore sculptural concepts of weight, tension, balance, and permanence. She is the recipient of a 2006 SECA Art Award. Pederson splits her time between San Francisco and Berlin.
Leslie Shows is an American artist, who is recognized for expanding the boundaries of landscape painting.
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Josh Faught, is an American fiber artist and educator, who creates sculptures, textiles, collages, and paintings. His work incorporates techniques such as knitting, crochet, and weaving, and addresses topics of craft and queer history. His fiber sculptures, influenced by both domestic crafts and art styles such as abstract and color field painting, are often either hung on the wall or stretched over scaffolding such as garden trellises; they are three-dimensional but forward-oriented. He is San Francisco based.
Kota Ezawa is a Japanese-German American artist and arts educator. His artwork usually responds to current events from sources in the news, pop culture, and art history. Ever since his debut 2002 video animation of The Simpson Verdict, Ezawa has been known for his flattened style in works on paper, light-boxes, and videos. By flattening his pieces into more two-dimensional figures, he creates more focus on the re-contextualized historical events in his pieces.
Laurie Reid is an American artist living in Berkeley, California.
Gay Outlaw is an American artist working in sculpture, photography and printmaking. She is known for her "rigorous and unexpected explorations of material". She is based in San Francisco, California.
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Rolando Castellón, also known as Rolando Dionisio Castellón-Alegria is a Nicaraguan American painter, author, art historian, and curator. He was a well-known contributor to the arts of San Francisco, California and he has lived in Costa Rica since 2013.
Irene Pijoan was a Swiss-born American painter, sculptor, and educator. She was active in the San Francisco Bay Area and taught at the San Francisco Art Institute for more than 20 years.
Alison "Ali" Gass is an American curator and museum director. She is the founding director of the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco. She has served as the director of the Institute of Contemporary Art San José, Smart Museum of Art, and chief curator of the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.
Elizabeth Hernández is a Mexican-born American visual artist and designer. She works many mediums including in painting, murals, ceramics, and embossed aluminum sculpture. She lives in Oakland, California.
Museum officials confirm that SECA, the group, was founded by 75 men in 1961 to "seek out promising young artists, jury an exhibition and encourage members of the community to collect the work of emerging artists." By 1966, the year before the award was established, it began to admit women.