Pauline Oliveros Winner of $50,000 John Cage Award

Pauline Oliveros - Photo by Gisela Gamper

Foundation for Contemporary Arts has named Pauline Oliveros the winner of the John Cage Award for 2012. The $50,000 prize is made biennially in recognition of outstanding achievement in the arts for work that reflects the spirit of John Cage.

The John Cage Award was established in 1992 in honor of the late composer, who was one of FCA’s founders. The selection is made by FCA’s directors from invited nominations. The current directors of the Foundation are: Brooke Alexander, Frances Fergusson, Agnes Gund, Jasper Johns, Julian Lethbridge, Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker, and T.J. Wilcox.

Oliveros is the founder of the Deep Listening Institute. Since the 1960s, she has worked with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth, and ritual. Oliveros represented the U.S. at the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka, Japan, and was honored in 1985 with a retrospective at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. She is a distinguished research professor of music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a Darius Milhaud composer-in-residence at Mills College in Oakland, California.

(—from the press release)