The Alumni Council of the Art Academy of Cincinnati is proud to confer upon Tony Tasset the 2019 Distinguished Alumnus Award. Tasset will also join at the Academy’s Commencement speaker.
Tasset fuses unstinting candor, dizzying scale shifts, and precise prismatic rendering of familiar objects and forms to create towering sculptures, paintings, and installations that transfix, startle, prickle, and captivate viewers around the globe. These massive spectacles provoke spontaneous dialogue among persons encountering each other as they come upon Tasset’s outdoor sculptures, characterized by luminous color and unimaginable depth, weight, height, width, and impact.
In California, morning commuters are fixated on a strange rainbow that does not drift, transmute, or vaporize in the midst of Culver City’s blue sky. Rainbow, commissioned by Sony Pictures Entertainment as the Sony Pictures Studios landmark, weighs over 50,000 tons; stands 94 feet high, and is visible for miles away from all vantage points.
In downtown Dallas, pedestrians are stopped mid-gait on Main Street, contemplating the true-to-life colors, shape, anatomy, and expressiveness of a live human eyeball – but one that stands three stories high.
Tony Tasset’s works are anything but “tacit.” Rather, they are astounding, radical, commanding, and arresting. The artist’s own uncurbed, seemingly boundless, and momentous art has held innumerable people around the globe spellbound for 35 years.
About Tony Tasset
A native of Cincinnati, OH, Tony Tasset is a Professor Emeritus of the University of Illinois at Chicago. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Art Academy of Cincinnati in 1983 and was awarded the Stephen H. Wilder Traveling Fellowship upon graduation.
Tasset earned his Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1985 and has made Chicago the pivot point of an international career.
Tasset’s roster of honors includes The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Award; an Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship; The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Awards in Painting, Sculpture, Printmaking, and Craft Media; Awards in the Visual Arts 9, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC; and the John Quincy Adams Traveling Fellowship (SAIC). Tasset has shown sculpture, painting, photography, video, taxidermy, and multi-media works in nearly 200 exhibitions, including approximately 50 solo shows.
His works have been exhibited throughout the United States and in numerous venues in Austria, Canada, Ecuador, England, Finland, Germany, Italy, Korea, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Spain, and Switzerland. Tasset’s works are collected by prestigious museum repositories and private collectors in the United States and Germany. Tony Tasset is represented by Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago. For more information about the artist, please visit //kavigupta.com/artist/tony-tasset/.
