Meet Elizabeth Turk, Atlanta’s Macarthur genius
A local sculptor is among the 2010 recipients for the Macarthur Foundation’s $500,000 fellowship
Atlanta’s Elizabeth Turk was named among the 2010 Macarthur Fellows this morning. Turk is a sculptor that works primarily with marble, creating what the foundation calls “strikingly intricate, seemingly weightless objects that defy expectations of a traditionally monumental, heavy, and prone-to-fracture material.” The $500,000 fellowship, better known as the “Genius” grant, doesn’t come with any obligations except, of course, the pressure of being given a half-million dollars and being called a “Genius.”
The above video and profile produced by Macarthur are a nice introduction, but the Lux Art Institute in California (where Turk was recently an artist in residence) has an excellent gallery of her work. This profile from San Diego’s public radio explains some of her interest in working with stone. Hirsch & Adler Modern has a slideshow of her 2006 exhibition The Collars as well as the ribbon-like works of her Recent Sculpture in 2008.
The 2010 fellows include television producer David Simon, fiction writer Yiyun Li, installation artist Jorge Pardo and others.