Make that four Yale Guggenheim winners

The good news that three Yale faculty members won 2017 Guggenheim Fellowships has turned out to be even better news. Byron Kim, senior critic at Yale School of Art, has also won the prestigious award.

The fellowship winners are appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise. The Yale faculty members were among the 173 scholars, artists, and scientists chosen for this year’s award from among almost 3,000 applicants.

Kim received a B.A. in English from Yale College in 1983 and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1986. His work balances abstraction and representation, and conceptualism and pure painting.  He is best known for his painting, “Synecdoche,” which was included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial. Comprised of a grid of hundreds of panels depicting human skin color, the work is both an abstract painting in monochromes and a group portrait. His ongoing series of Sunday Paintings, in which he records the appearance of the sky every week along with a diary entry, juxtaposes the cosmological with the common place.

His works are in the permanent collections of many renowned galleries, including the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago; the Berkeley Art Museum, the M+ Museum in Hong Kong, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and many others. Among his  numerous awards are the Louise Nevelson Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the National Endowment of the Arts Award, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, and the Alpert Award in the Arts.

 Yet another update: And then there were six (Guggenheim winners)