David Antin Prize
The winner of the 2023 David Antin Prize is MFA candidate Wren Gardiner!
The Antin Prize Committee is pleased to announce Wren Gardiner as the Antin Prize awardee for 2023. Wren's recent body of work is an impressive achievement, bringing together linguistic, performative, and technical experimentations. All of the third-year students are deserving of support; in this case, we had the rare opportunity to honor someone whose practice directly recalls the artist(s) who this prize is named for: David Antin was a poet, critic and performance artist. Eleanor Antin is a performance artist and writer whose work spans photography, video, installation, and playwrighting. Both of them taught at UCSD for decades, shaping the program with their collaborative sensibility and interest in crossing institutional boundaries, between poetry and criticism, theater and conceptual art. This annual prize, the Antin Award, is given to a third-year MFA Visual Arts student who reflects Antin’s focus on interdisciplinary work, the use of multiple mediums, and who has shown originality and creativity in work as an artist and/or writer. Wren Gardiner's work recalls the Antin's legacy in their use of language, performance, video, and explorations of the self. Like Eleanor Antin's alter-ego projects and feminist photographic series such as Carving, A Traditional Sculpture (1972), Wren's new body of work uses humor and play to question contemporary notions of what it means to be a subject, with a body, voice and history, who is themselves subject to the pressures created by mediation, through television, the internet, and social media. Wren's final thesis project peaks to a dedication to their craft, coupled with a willingness to publicly explore the intimate and contradictory process of crafting an identity in the age of the "spectacle-commodity economy." That's Wren!
This annual prize was started to support a third-year MFA Visual Arts student who reflects David Antin’s focus on interdisciplinary work and the use of multiple mediums. The awardee has shown originality and creativity in work as an artist or writer in the field of art criticism. The prize comes with a $1,000 award.
David Antin, a poet, critic and performance artist of lasting importance, passed away on October 11, 2016. He was 84. His background included undergraduate work in science and languages with graduate work in linguistics at New York University (his special project was the language structure of Gertrude Stein). He edited and translated several science and math books and pursued a career as a poet since 1955 and that of an art critic since 1964. He also served as the Educational Curator for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston before joining the Visual Arts Department in 1968.
For four years he was Director of the UCSD Mandeville Art Gallery, assembling exhibitions of post-Pop representation (Katz, Morley, Estes, Wesselman), an exhibition of Nancy Spero’s Artaud Drawings, a video piece by Keith Sonnier, an installation piece by Richard Serra, and a performance by Joan Jonas, as well as a large group show of artists from the Fluxus group. He also started the poetry readings at UCSD, the recordings from which became part of the UCSD Library’s Special Collections’ Poetry Archive, which he helped inaugurate.
Antin began full-time teaching in 1972 and his courses covered such areas as the Structure of Art, History of Criticism, Tactics and Strategies, Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism, and Narrative Theory.