Jean Leering Biography: winner of the AICA Prize!
25 January 2022, online
- Valiz's 2018 Jean Leering Biography has won the AICA Prize
- The AICA Prize is awarded to a publication that has distinguished itself in a special way in the field of visual art in 2018, 2019 and 2020.
What: Valiz publication 'Het gaat om heel eenvoudige dingen': Jean Leering en de kunst Jean has received the AICA Prize!
Organised by: AICA Nederland
Every year, AICA-Nederland awards a prize to a Dutch institution, exhibition or publication from the past three years. Until 2019, that prize was called the AICA oorkonde, but for purposes of recognisability, the board renamed the prize last year as the AICA Prize. This year the prize will go to an art critic or historian who lives and works in the Netherlands. A jury, made up this year of Let Geerling, Laurens Meerman and Robert-Jan Muller, has made the shortlist. The final choice is up to the members.
This year, the AICA prize will be awarded to a publication that has distinguished itself in a special way in the field of visual art in 2018, 2019 and 2020. The jury has put together a shortlist of four titles, which will be presented on 25 January. at 5:00 p.m., at the online AICA New Year's Salon.
The jury writes:
"In these times, it is important to read how Jean Leering attempted to turn his museum into a generator of thinking about social issues in the 1960s. It is not for nothing that Kempers considers current Van Abbe director Charles Esche as Leering's heir. Mandatory and compelling reading for any museum director who wants to use the museum, as the book puts it, as 'socially anchored awareness center'."
About the jury members:
Let Geerling is head of Radboud Kunstzaken, the joint art program of Radboudmc and Radboud University in Nijmegen. Before that, Let was a staff member of the curatorial team Sonsbeek 93, editor-in-chief of Metropolis M, curator of Culture & Spatial Planning at the province of Overijssel and board member of the Netherlands Business Collections Association.
Laurens Meerman is an online editor at the Rembrandt Association and a publicist, with a special interest in collecting history. His pieces have appeared in Kunstschrift, Boekman and Simiolus, among others.
Robert-Jan Muller is an art historian and mainly publishes on modern and contemporary art. He has published for Metropolis M, Archis, Het Parool, Artforum and others and is a regular author for Museum Magazine. In recent years he has made filmed short documentaries about national and international visual artists. He was an art and design consultant for KPN, an advisor at Kunst en Bedrijf and an art and public space consultant in the province of Overijssel. Publications include a monograph on the painter Erik Andriesse and the overview work The Words and Images, Text and Image in Twentieth-Century Art. In 2021 he was one of the compilers of the international AICA webinar 'Decolonisation in the Museum: Interrogating the History of Slavery'.