Herb Alpert Award in the Arts Celebrates 30th Anniversary

“In a confusing world like ours, we count on the artist to deliver the truth…”

—Herb Alpert.

On May 2, the Herb Alpert Foundation in partnership with CalArts announced the 30^th annual winners of the 2024 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (HAAIA), a $75,000 unrestricted prize given this year to ten mid-career artists, two in each of five categories: Jonathan Gonzalez and Mariana Valencia in Dance; Nuotama Bodomo and Lucy Raven in Film/Video; Huang Ruo and Anna Weber in Music; Robin Forhardt and Cannupa Hanska Luger in Theatre; and Marina Rosenfeld and Marie Watt in Visual Arts.

This year’s panelists are no less distinguished. The 2024 HAAIA Panelists are: In Dance: John Andress, Bill T. Jones Director; Stanford Makishi, Artistic Director, Dance, New York City Center; Charmaine Warren, Founder/Artistic Director, Black Dance Stories. In Film/Video: Pablo de Ocampo, from Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center; artist/filmmaker Arthur Jafa; and artist Leslie Thornton. In Music: musician/composer Steve Coleman; composer Adam Fong; and composer Julia Wolfe. In Theatre: Nataki Garrett, co-artistic director, One Nation/One Project; Woolly Mammoth Theater artistic director Maria Goyanes; Meiyin Wang, Director of Producing and Programming of New York’s Perelman Performing Arts Center. In Visual Arts: independent curator and writer Ruth Estévez; artist Emily Jacir; and artist Tanya Lukin Linklater.

In the last 30 years, Herb and Lani Hall Alpert have given life-changing, career sustaining grants to artists who have garnered great acclaim and accomplishment, including Carrie Mae Weems. Taylor Mac, Suzan-Lori Parks, Julia Wolfe, Michelle Dorrance, Tania Brugera, Kerry James Marshall, Lisa Kron, Sharon Lockhart, Ralph Lemon, Arthur Jafa, Cai Guo-Qiang, Daniel Fish, Michael Rakowitz.

Rona Sebastian, President of the Herb Alpert Foundation added, “Herb and Lani Alpert continue their decades-long commitment to support those art makers and performing artists who, in grappling with our challenging world, are creating innovative, vital, and necessary work.”

Herb Alpert has spent his entire adult life in the service of the artist. He began writing songs and managing performers such as Jan and Dean, before becoming a recording artist himself with his band, The Tijuana Brass, with whom he experienced unparalleled success.

Between 1965 and 1967 Alpert had songs in the top ten for a consecutive 81 weeks. In one 18-month period mid-Sixties, Alpert performed at the White House three times. An animated short called “A Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Double Feature” even won an Oscar in 1966. Alpert has recorded five No. 1 albums; made fourteen platinum albums and fifteen gold albums. Alpert is the only musician to hit No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 as both a vocalist (“This Guy’s in Love with You”, 1968) and an instrumentalist (“Rise”, 1979). Alpert’s many awards include a Tony Award and eight Grammy Awards, as well as the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2006, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded him the National Medal of Arts.

With Jerry Moss, he founded A&M records which nurtured artists who defined their times, from jazz artists Carlos Antionio Jobim, Sergio Mendes and Chuck Mangione, to singer songwriters such as the Carpenters, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Sting and Janet Jackson to name but a few. Through his distribution deal with former management partner Lou Adler, A&M released the work of Carole King and her chart-busting classic album Tapestry, as well as one of the most successful comedy albums of all time, Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke.

It was through Sergio Mendes and his band Brazil 66 that Alpert met their singer, Lani Hall, who became his wife and life partner in every way including their philanthropy.

One of the things that makes the foundation’s work important, Sebastian said, is their holistic approach to supporting the arts. The Herb Alpert Foundation supports and nurtures the artist in every person, whether it is in their support of progressive schools in Los Angeles such as New Roads, or the Harlem School of the Arts in New York, providing scholarships at CalArts, making tuition free for music students at Los Angeles City College, or endowing the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music,

In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, federal and state Arts funding in the United States came under attack. Funding to the National Endowment for the Arts was slashed and support of AIDS-related Art exhibitions canceled. Artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Karen Finley, and Andres Serrano were attacked, and their work deemed obscene and offensive to the public.

Alpert wanted to respond in a way that allowed artists their freedom of exploration as much as their freedom of expression. In 1994, the Foundation approached CalArts President Steven Lavine “with the idea of a jointly designated and administered program of support for artists.”

The foundation was already supporting scholarships at CalArts so there was an existing relationship. Lavine had experience with fellowships having worked at The Rockefeller Foundation, and recommended the awards having a nominating process and then a selection panel so they would not be flooded with applications. Beyond that, Lavine wanted to create a process that was deemed clean and beyond reproach. Accordingly, he insisted to no current CalArts faculty could be eligible for the award.

In creating the awards, Alpert was interested in supporting artists who were already on their path, but who were at a point in their career where their future potential could be unleashed by an award that gave them both some financial respite and recognition for their work. Alpert understood how critical this can be because he is an artist.

“All artists should be looking for their own voices,” Alpert has said. “I went through a period of trying to sound like Harry James and Louis Armstrong and Miles [Davis]… Then when I heard Les Paul multitrack his guitar on recordings, I tried that with the trumpet. Boom—that sound came out…I said, ‘That’s the type of music I want to make. I want to make music that transports people.’ Alpert told Offbeat Magazine, in 2017.

To make the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts a reality, Lavine understood that it was essential the foundation hire the right person to administrate the awards. Lavine explained that “to give flesh to these bare bones and to oversee the entire process, CalArts recruited writer, teacher, and dance scholar Irene Borger.” Noting that “we chose better than we knew, for Irene brought not only wide knowledge and a caring sense of responsibility but also a respect for the individual artist and a generosity of spirit….”

Sebastian recalled that when she joined the foundation the awards were already in existence, but Alpert was concerned about whether the awards made a difference in the lives of the artists. At the time they commissioned a study which determined that the recognition from the award impacted both the artists as well as the panelists.

The awards were originally $50,000 each but in time that was raised to $75,000, and during the pandemic, Alpert and Sebastian decided to give awards to two people in each category rather than just one, which Sebastian cites as “Another example of Herb’s incredible generosity and his sense of wanting to help artists.” Sebastian said that Alpert, who is still performing, composing music, making paintings and sculptures, doesn’t judge the type of art, he just supports the artists.

The process that Borger and Lavine developed invites 50 prominent artists and arts professionals, (curators, artistic directors, presenters, critics, academics), working in the United States, to serve as Herb Alpert Award nominators. Each nominator is responsible for recommending two adventurous, engaged, mid-career artists who, demonstrating exceptional talent, are generating a vital, original body of work. Next, the recommended artists are invited to apply and articulate their practice and their ambitions.

Fifteen panelists are selected, three on each of the five panels (Dance, Film/Video, Music, Theatre and Visual Arts). Many of the panelists are well-known in their fields. From museum directors to highly respected art makers including playwrights Tony Kushner and David Henry Hwang, director Julie Taymor, choreographer Trisha Brown, musicians Don Byron, and David Harrington of Kronos Quartet, visual artist Ann Hamilton, artistic director of the Public Theatre, Oskar Eustis, critics John Lahr, and Mark Swed, and journalist and MacArthur fellow Alma Guillermoprieto.

After looking at the submitted materials, the panelists gather for two days of intense concentration, deep listening, and real talk culminating in the selection of the recipients. As playwright, screenwriter and HIAA panelist Tony Kushner remarked in his keynote address on the occasion of the Award’s fifth anniversary: “… the artists I met through the process of adjudicating this award, co-panelists and candidates, respond to the culture of crises and emergency with wit, resourcefulness, defiance, courage, self-sacrifice, rage, and an awesome faith in the power of truth, and, yes, even beauty……Art even in crisis extends our vision, reminds us of the God-like cunning of laboring human beings, and reminds us that history is far from over, and may at any moment, unexpectedly open to reveal the moment of redemption. And art prepares us for that moment.”

“Over time, the awards have generated its own credibility” Lavine said recently, saying that HAAIA has increased in stature in the artistic community. Providing recognition for the artists is so important, Alpert said, because “Artists are the heart and soul of our country and need to be honored and supported.”

George Lewis, who has been both a panelist and award winner said of the Alpert Awards: “The first time I visited the Alpert Foundation office, I saw photos of Louis Armstrong and my old bandmaster Count Basie on the walls. Right then, I knew that I was among people who understood what innovation was about.”

Lewis added that, “My association with the Alpert Award has been long, deep and even familial, in that my spouse Miya Masaoka and I have been panelists, nominators, and awardees. I’ve watched the Alpert Award become one of the most prestigious and important ways of supporting artists, fueled by the extraordinary vision and artistic example of Herb and Lani, and the tireless work and perspicacity of Rona Sebastian and Irene Borger. I’ve seen the Award change lives, including my own. As a panelist you are encouraged to let your generosity and communitarian genes express to the fullest, and as an awardee, you gain a better understanding of how the arts intersect, and you revise your understanding of who you are as an artist and a person.”

One measure of the success of the HAIA is that award winners often go on to receive other notable prizes, awards further validating their work. For example, Photo artist Carrie Mae Weems, a 1996 HAIA winner, was awarded the MacArthur “genius” grant in 2013; Painter Kerry James Marshall, a 1997 HAIA awardee received a 1997 MacArthur fellowship; Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, received a HAIA in 1996, a MacArthur in 2001, and a in Pulitzer 2002. Musician and composer George Lewis, a 1999 HAIA awardee and frequent panelist, won a MacArthur in 2002; Dancer Michelle Dorrance won a HAIA in 2014, and a MacArthur the following year in 2015; and Sky Hopinka a 2020 HAIA awardee who is also a 2022 MacArthur fellow. HAAIA grantees have also gone on to be recipients of the Hugo Boss Prize, The Doris Duke Artist Awards and the Guggenheim Fellowship.

Daniel Fish, the Tony-nominated director of the revival of Oklahoma, said about being an HAAIA recipient that it wasn’t so much the money as the affirmation he received that was meaningful. Winning the Herb Alpert gave him the confidence to stay true to his vision. When he was challenged regarding certain design or set matters as being too expensive, he knew that if he needed to he could pay for those himself. “That meant a lot,” Fish said.

One honoree described how, not having health care, the year they needed to spend more than $50,000 on life-saving treatments for their child, the award made all the difference in the world.

Lavine also commented on the immeasurable value to CalArts students of having the award winners as visiting artists. “These are extraordinary people,” Lavine said of their impact on students. The visiting artists inspire the students in ways, Lavine said, that create “new paths and new opportunities.”

Nonetheless, in the last three decades, the environment for artists continues to be difficult, as Art and the support of Art has been increasingly politicized, with various constituencies seeking to increase their importance by manufacturing outrage and by using artists and their artworks as pawns in their political or interest group’s bids for attention, influence, and power.

“We are living through a dark time,” Lavine said recently, “One of the things totalitarian governments don’t want is people who think for themselves. These artists need to be helped and celebrated as much as possible.”

Thirty years on, the HAAIA remain a vital lifeline to artists because government officials, Alpert said recently, “don’t fully understand the human value and life-giving positive energy that all the arts provide.”

As Borger noted, “At this moment of increasingly retrograde and terrifying laws and actions, Herb Alpert Award panelists arrived energized to identify rigorous investigations, compelling voices and invigorating forms imbedded with deep questions and propositions for alternative, necessary and more humane futures.”

Let us leave the last word about the HAAIA awards to Herb Alpert, who remains focused on the artists and said to the award winners: “If this award assists you while on your personal path and brings added recognition to the enduring value of your art, then my greatest wish will have been fulfilled.”