On Monday, October 21st, President Joe Biden presented the National Medal of the Arts to 20 artists, musicians, filmmakers, and other creatives. The highest award for artists and arts patrons in the United States, the medals were given to 2022 and 2023 honorees during a ceremony at the White House in Washington, D.C. Among the 2023 honorees are painters Mark Bradford and Alex Katz, while recipients of the 2022 awards include the late sculptor Ruth Asawa, artist Carrie Mae Weems, and landscape photographer Clyde Butcher.
“With absolute courage, you combat racial stereotypes, confront ghosts of history, and speak truth to power—as Jill Biden’s husband, I know the power of women in this room,” President Joe Biden said following the medal ceremony, The Art Newspaper reported. “The artist’s gift is a sixth sense, to imagine something that no one else can carve, paint, write, sing, dance or film until they set their vision free.”
The 2023 list also includes arts patron Jo Carole Lauder, who is married to cosmetics billionaire and mega collector Ronald S. Lauder. Other medalists include Spike Lee, Steven Spielberg, Queen Latifah, Selena Quintanilla, and Ken Burns. Recipients of the 2022 medals include Bruce Sagan, Randy A. Batista, Missy Elliot, Leonardo “Flaco” Jimenez, Herbert I. Ohta, Eva Longoria, and Idina Menzel.
The National Medal of the Arts was first founded by the United States Congress in 1984. Each year, the National Council of the Arts, the advisory board of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), provides a shortlist of nominees to the sitting president, who then selects the medal recipients. The medal itself was designed by the late sculptor Robert Graham. Previous honorees include Georgia O’Keeffe, James Turrell, Robert Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning, and Isamu Noguchi.
“The arts enrich our lives, helping us to ask questions, imagine new possibilities, and create community,” said NEA chair Maria Rosario Jackson, PhD. “The NEA is pleased to join President Biden in congratulating the 2022 and 2023 National Medal of Arts recipients whose curiosity, creativity, hard work, and dedication have inspired and touched so many in our country and around the globe.”
