Emmanuel Iduma
2020 AICA-USA Irving Sandler Award for New Voices in Art Criticism:
Emmanuel Iduma
Emmanuel Iduma by Ayobami Adebayo.
Monday, May 2, 2022
6:00 PM EDT
Virtual Event
AICA-USA announces a new award: the AICA-USA Irving Sandler Award for New Voices in Art Criticism. The first recipient is art critic and novelist Emmanuel Iduma. Iduma was selected following a rigorous review of the most important American art writers working today in the first decade of their careers. AICA-USA jurors praised the uniqueness of his critical voice and the consistency and quality of his work.
Initially, Iduma was to be honored in an award ceremony at the Whitney Museum of American Art in May of 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a cancellation of this event. On Monday, May 2nd at 6PM EDT, he will present a virtual talk, "From Glimpse to Record: Notes on Narrative as Criticism," in conjunction with this award.
Nine members of AICA-USA's board of directors participated in the nomination and selection process: Judith Stein, Norman L. Kleeblatt, Amei Wallach, Susan Harris, Phong Bui, Noah Dillon, William Fenstermaker, Lee Ann Norman and Lilly Wei.
Judith Stein, AICA-USA co-president, says of Iduma’s work, “Emmanuel Iduma writes about art, he confides, ‘to come to terms with history.’ With a focus on the diasporic condition, Iduma unpacks Africa’s past for us, contextualizing it with elegance and insight.”
According to Stein’s fellow co-president Norman L. Kleeblatt, “On many levels it’s a difficult time for art critics. Despite the newer opportunities offered in electronic media, there are fewer venues for full time positions, lower compensation, as well as general lack of security. It’s therefore all the more urgent to recognize that there are important voices to be heard and elevated.”
AICA-USA board member Amei Wallach adds: “This is an award that links Sandler and his on-the-ground observations of successive decades of charged moments in a newly assertive American art with Iduma’s contemporary eye for the disjunctive poetry of disparate times. It acknowledges a new generation of art critics and critical concerns.”
AICA-USA created the award in honor of the late Irving Sandler, esteemed art critic and valued board member and friend, who tirelessly illuminated the role of art, artists and art criticism in the 20th and 21st centuries. The award includes a gift of $2,500.
“For as long as I have written about art, I have treated criticism as a porous container to account for my interest in narrative forms (fiction, storytelling, and history). In this lecture, I hope to expand on my thinking in that regard: to test the idea that distinctions in form can eschew hierarchy, to consider the overlaps between art criticism and literary nonfiction, and to present several (discreet and oblique) notes on method—the method I hope to adopt as I begin work, sooner or later, on a narrative essay on African photography. Ultimately, to meditate on the correspondences between narrator and interlocutor.”
Emmanuel Iduma was born and raised in Nigeria, where he trained as a lawyer. His recent nonfiction work, A Stranger’s Pose (2018), was longlisted for the 2019 Ondaatje Prize. He has contributed nonfiction and criticism to Granta, the New York Review of Books, Aperture, n+1, Artforum, Best American Travel Writing 2020, Art in America, among other places. His art writing has been honored with the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant, the inaugural Irving Sandler Award for New Voices in Art Criticism from AICA-USA, and the C/O Berlin Talent Prize for Theory. In 2020, he was listed in Apollo International Art Magazine’s 40 under 40 Africa for the broad social impact of his work. For his nonfiction, he was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for Literature in 2022.
Iduma received an MFA in Art Criticism and Writing from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and taught in three of its graduate programs. He currently edits Tender Photo, a newsletter publication featuring the work of early to mid-career African photographers. I Am Still With You, his memoir on the aftermath of the Nigerian civil war, was awarded a Silvers Grant for Work in Progress, and is forthcoming from Algonquin (US), and William Collins (UK) in March 2023.