Herb Alpert Award 2024 for Film/Video awarded to Lucy Raven

3 May 2024

Congratulations to Lucy Raven who is among the recipients for the 2024 Herb Alpert Award. The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts is an unrestricted prize of $75,000 given annually to risk-taking mid-career artists working in the fields of dance, film/video, music, theatre and the visual arts.

The prize was initiated and funded by the Herb Alpert Foundation and has been administered by California Institute of the Arts since 1994. The Award honors and supports artists respected for their creativity, ingenuity, and bodies of work, at a moment in their lives when they are poised to propel their art in new and unpredictable directions, recognizing experimenters who are making something that matters within and beyond their field.

Awarded in the category of Film/Video, Lucy Raven’s multidisciplinary practice includes moving image installations, photography, drawings, and sculpture. She is presently at work on the third installment of her series The Drumfire, which takes the genre Western movie as a point of departure to explore themes of material state change, pressure, force, and cycles of violence in the (de- and re-)formation of the Western United States. In these and other works, Raven investigates hidden ideologies of industrial labor and global production circuits, ownership and displacement, the physical and economic realities, complex processes and mutability of matter (concrete, explosives, water, raw copper ore…) as well as opticality, power, and cinema history. Avoiding conventional narrative, subtly inflected abstractions and minimalism become an aperture for contemplation.

With deep conceptual rigor and a uniquely adept sensitivity to the challenge of rendering a world at risk, Raven is rethinking and repurposing both the history and lineage of avant-garde and structuralist film and the myth and history of the American West.