Arts Prizes: A Revised Kennedy Center Awards Process
THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Ashley Southall
ART PRIZES---When Herbie Hancock learned he was one of the five artists to be honored this year by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the surprise, he said, brought him to the verge of tears. “And that doesn’t happen to me very often.” The Kennedy Center has been criticized for using a selection process that is too secretive and has yielded too few Latino recipients. Before Ms. Arroyo and Mr. Santana, the actress Chita Rivera and the opera star Plácido Domingo were the only Latinos among 185 artists who had received the award since it was created in 1978 with a single criterion: excellence. After an internal review, the Kennedy Center expanded its artists’ committee, which picks the nominees, and began accepting recommendations from the public. It also created a committee that includes two previous winners, Ms. Rivera and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, to narrow the list of nominees for the Kennedy Center board of trustees, which makes the final decisions. [link]
By Ashley Southall
ART PRIZES---When Herbie Hancock learned he was one of the five artists to be honored this year by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the surprise, he said, brought him to the verge of tears. “And that doesn’t happen to me very often.” The Kennedy Center has been criticized for using a selection process that is too secretive and has yielded too few Latino recipients. Before Ms. Arroyo and Mr. Santana, the actress Chita Rivera and the opera star Plácido Domingo were the only Latinos among 185 artists who had received the award since it was created in 1978 with a single criterion: excellence. After an internal review, the Kennedy Center expanded its artists’ committee, which picks the nominees, and began accepting recommendations from the public. It also created a committee that includes two previous winners, Ms. Rivera and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, to narrow the list of nominees for the Kennedy Center board of trustees, which makes the final decisions. [link]
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