D'Cuba Jazz

They will be feted during a virtual celebration on May 20. The awards
<https://herbalpertawards.org/> were founded by the legendary musician
and artist Alpert and his wife, Grammy-winning singer Lani Hall, as a
way to single out artists for “challenging and transforming art, their
respective disciplines and society.” To date, they’ve honored 130
artists and through the Santa Monica-based Herb Alpert Foundation,
they’ve doled out close to $200 million through various art initiatives.

“I like artists who take the road less traveled,” Alpert tells /The
Hollywood Reporter/. “I really think artists are more important than
politicians. They are more honest — whether they are Republican,
Democrat, Libertarian or whatever — their function is to be honest. You
have to be authentic to be a great artist and that’s why I love the arts.”

The grants are unrestricted and the artists are free to use the $75,000
in any way they see fit. “Artists are the second responders,” notes
Alpert, who, in addition to his music and philanthropy owns Vibrato
Grill Jazz at The Glen Centre off Beverly Glen Circle. “They are the
ones who give us life and tell us what’s happening in the world.”

For the foundation and the Alperts, doubling the recipient roster meant
doubling the good news during what has been a challenging year due to
the COVID-19 pandemic which has decimated the arts and culture landscape
due to widespread closures of live entertainment venues, museums and
other institutions where artists practice their disciplines.

“Singular as they are, the 10 winners this year share several
qualities,” says Irene Borger, who has served as director of the Herb
Alpert Award in the Arts since its inception. “They are adventurous
experimenters, are attentive to the relationship between maker and
receiver, and set in motion a counterforce to the issues and absences of
our time.”

Each award is adjudicated by three-member panels of arts professionals
and artists in each of the five categories. This year featured 10 past
winners. Past recipients of the honor are such noted artists as Carrie
Mae Weems, Taylor Mac, Suzan-Lori Parks, Julia Wolfe, Michelle Dorrance,
Tania Bruguera, Kerry James Marshall, Lisa Kron, Sharon Lockhart, Ralph
Lemon, Arthur Jafa, Cai Guo-Qiang, Okwui Okpokwasili and Christian Scott
aTunde Adjuah, among many others.

More about 27th Herb Alpert Awards in the Arts honorees below.

*Choreographer Beth Gill*
A graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, she has
been working in contemporary dance and performance since 2005. Her
credits include /Untitled/, /Eleanor & Eleanor/, /what it looks like,
what it feels like/, and /Electric/ /Midwife/. Per the panel, she was
selected “for her masterful, demanding and idiosyncratic work, for her
startling, evocative images, for the theatrical, almost narrative
tension she sustains and for her use of minimal resources to sensually
and rigorously investigate the most private and interior of spaces.”

*Choreographer Will Rawls*
A graduate of Williams College, he has ben a guest artist at Bard
College, Barnard College and a mentor for Colorado College’s Department
of Theatre and Dance. His other work had appeared at Dance Theater
Workshop, Danspace Project, Dixon Place, the Brooklyn Museum,
Tanzquartier Wien, Mount Tremper Arts, and Williams College. Per the
panel, he was selected for using “his spare, elegant body to carry out a
fearless engagement with dance forms while never evading the very
present realities of race and gender.”

*Artist and filmmaker Kahlil Joseph*
The Emmy and Grammy-nominated filmmaker is known for his
multi-disciplinary work and collaborations with such artists as Kendrick
Lamar, Flying Lotus and Beyoncé, the latter with whom he worked on her
culture-shifting /Lemonade/. He’s been awarded many artistic prizes
including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and the Los
Angeles Artadia Award. Per the panel, he was chosen “for his masterful,
mesmerizing films and installations that affirm Black lives and the
historical struggle for liberation in America.”

*Artist and filmmaker Adam Khalil*
A Gates Millennium Scholar and graduate of Bard College in the Film and
Electronic Arts Department, he is a video artist and media archivist.
Per the panel, he was chosen “for generating a space for new forms by
and for Indigenous filmmakers through his collaborative filmmaking,
mentoring, and assertive position towards institutional politics. With a
prankster’s side-eye and biting critique, he creates dynamic, imperative
works that resist a finished ‘colonial gesture.`”

*Producer Toshi Reagon*
On her official website, the multi-talented musician describes her work
as “a one-woman celebration of all that’s dynamic, progressive and
uplifting in American music. Performing since the age of 17, her albums
include /Toshi, Have You Heard, The Righteous Ones, Justice and
Kindness/, works that span genres from blues to rolk to folk. According
to the panel, she was selected “for her beautiful, incendiary,
empowering and haunting work and for the example she continues to
provide of how an artist might help make the world a better place.”

*Pianist and composer David Virelles*
His albums include /Continuum/, /Mbóko/, /Antenna/ and /Gnosis/. He’s
been honored by the Canada Council for the Arts, Louis Applebaum Award
and Jazz Gallery Commission. The music panel selected him “for the
richness of his astonishing musical language, revealing serious research
of different folkloric traditions and deep cultural grounding, in an
original and inspiring variety of formats. His thoughtful, provocative
work is crucial for this moment.”

*Playwright Kimber Lee*
A graduate of UT Austin, Lee’s plays include /Untitled F*ck M*ss S**gon
Play/, /To the Yellow House/ and /Tokyo Fish Story./ She was selected
and singled out “for her fierce, vital, and bracingly original
investigations that, with incisive clarity, musical, muscular language,
and astonishing leaps of imagination, explode clichés, shatter
stereotypes, dare to imagine new theatrical forms, and grapple with the
most urgent conversations of our time.”

*Director and artist Kaneza Schaal*
She was named a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow and has received distinctions
from United States Artists Fellowship, SOROS Art Migration and Public
Space Fellowship, a Joyce Award and a Creative Capital Award. She has
taught at Princeton, Yale and Harvard. The panel offered this for
choosing Schaal: “Her pieces assert language, music, movement, film, and
design, valorize dreaming, humor, and rituals of restoration and do
nothing less than reimagine and reinvigorate the theatrical event.”

*Artist Steffani Jemison*
A graduate of the School of Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia
University, her work as appeared at Museum of Modern Art, Whitney
Museum, San Jose Museum of Art and Studio Museum in Harlem. She was
selected for “her rigorous, generous practice, breathing new life into
modernist ideas, bringing forward scholarship of the Black avant-garde
and experimenting with movement, gesture, language, and scores to create
intimate, reflective performances.”

*Artist Tanya Lukin Linklater*
A graduate of University of Alberta and Stanford University, she focuses
her work on investigating the histories of Indigenous people’s lives,
lands and structures of sustenance, according to her website. She has
shown work at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Chicago
Architecture Biennial. Per the panel, Linklater was selected for “her
thoughtful, visually compelling work that powerfully connects art-making
across time. Through varied means — archives, histories, language,
artifacts, presence and absence and embodiment — she engages community,
and dignifies indigenous voices with a deep generosity embedded into her
practice.”