Sarah Sze, the New York-based installation artist who represented the United States at the Venice Bienniale of Art in 2013, is the inaugural winner of the $100,000 Meraki Artist Award.
The Institute of Contemporary Art Boston will administer the new prize, which will be awarded annually for at least the next 10 years. Funded by Boston philanthropist Fotene Demoulas, the prize is named for the Greek term “meraki,” which means “to pour yourself into something,” said Jill Medvedow, the ICA’s director, “and I can think of no better way to describe Fotene’s longstanding support of artists and the ICA.”
The award, designed to recognize and celebrate women artists, comes as a prelude to an exhibition at the ICA next year of works Demoulas and husband, Tom Coté, have promised to donate to the museum in the years to come. Sze, who is from Boston, will be at the heart of that exhibition, which will also include other luminaries like Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Deana Lawson, Laura Owens, and Mickalene Thomas.
Sze’s work often weaves together elements of painting, sculpture, and video into outsized installations held together with wire, string, and slim wooden armatures. Always on the edge of chaos, its precarious nature both beguiles and unsettles as a reflection on the instability of the modern world and the random accretion of memory across the slippage of time. Sze’s work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Guggenheim Museum, and The Tate Modern, among others.
Demoulas, a long-time supporter of the ICA, has been a member of the museum’s board since 2009; the prize, and the gift of artworks, is a culmination of that longstanding relationship, an ICA spokesperson said.
Sze, a professor of visual arts at Columbia University and former MacArthur fellow, will accept the award at the ICA’s annual Women’s Luncheon on May 5.
Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte.
