Hermitage Retreat unveils two Greenfield Prize commissions for 15th anniversary

Visual artist Sandy Rodriguez and hip hop dancer and choreographer Lorenzo “Rennie” Harris  are among the happiest creative artists in the country this week. They each have received $30,000 commissions to create new work as recipients of the 2023 Hermitage Greenfield Prize.

The prize, administered by the Hermitage Artist Retreat in Englewood, annually presents commissions that rotate among the fields of theater, music and visual art and has previously honored playwrights Craig Lucas, Nilo Cruz and John Guare, composers Vijay Iyer and Bobby Previte, and visual artists Coco Fusco, Trenton Doyle Hancock and Sanford Biggers.

To mark the 15th anniversary of the prize and the 20th anniversary of the Hermitage itself, the program revealed two awards. Sandy Rodriguez, who lives in California, and creates map-like paintings that combine history, social memory, contemporary politics and culture, is the winner in visual arts. Lorenzo “Rennie” Harris, a hip hop dancer and choreographer from North Philadelphia who created Rennie Harris Puremovement 30 years ago, is receiving the first Greenfield Prize in dance and choreography, added as a special honor this year to mark the anniversary.

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Each will receive $30,000 and about six weeks at the Gulf-front retreat on Manasota Key over the next two years to work on their projects before they present them with a Sarasota area arts organization in 2025.

In an interview, Rodriguez described herself as an artist and a researcher. “My work really engages with a variety of disciplines, including art history, anthropology, conservation, consulting with a variety of historians, artists, community stakeholders,” she said.

She creates maps following “recipes” passed down from the 16th century that are “collapsing time and space and how we arrived at this current time frame, where we came from. What makes this space so special and unique,” she said.

Rodriguez intends to create a map of some part of the Sarasota area, perhaps the area around the Hermitage site. After 20 years in museum education, her large-scale maps, also include QR codes to allow viewers to engage more deeply with information available online and to provide curricular connections for educators and students.

She has been creating maps dealing with the Southwest and Mexico over the last seven years “and I never thought I would get to do it in the Southeast,” she said.

Each winner was chosen by a three-person jury of experts in the individual fields. They put together lists of potential honorees and invited a select number to submit proposals.

Her work has been seen around the world, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum and The Huntington Library.

Anne Patterson, a multi-disciplinary artist from Brooklyn and one of the visual art jurors, said it was a difficult decision but Rodriguez “had done a lot of research for her proposal. It’s very site specific.” Rodriguez also uses local flora and fauna “like a chemist. She takes the plants and leaves and boils them down to create paint with them,” Patterson said.

Patterson was part of the visual art jury with Christine Kuan, president and executive director of Creative Capital, and Allison Glenn, senior curator at New York’s Public Art Fund. The finalists were Maura Brewer, whose work has been seen at the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; Azza El Siddique, whose work has been seen at MIT List Center, the Gardiner Museum in Toronto and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto; and Joanna Keane Lopez, who has been supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and has had work exhibited at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Art Museum and the Sarasota Art Museum.

Each finalist will receive a Hermitage fellowship and a $1,000 prize.

First time dance prize

Harris is considered a pioneer in the street dance movement, what jurors described as an American art form and a social dance.

“It comes from the street and doesn’t have all the vestiges of graduates from Juilliard or the conservatories,” said Joseph Melillo, former executive producer of the Brooklyn Academy of Music and chair of the dance/choreography jury.

During a Zoom call to notify the winners along with major supporters of the Hermitage and Greenfield Prize, Harris said the honor made him aware that people are paying attention to what he’s doing.

“Often you’re moving and not realizing that people are watching you, you’re just in your own world, moving straight and figuring things out, and you never really know who’s keeping an eye out,” he said.

Harris founded Rennie Harris Puremovement in 1992 to preserve and share hip hop culture through classes, workshops, lecture demonstrations and public performances.

The prize is “a major big deal,” he said in a later interview. “We’re not a brick-and-mortar company. We don’t have a season. Whoever is interested in the work, that’s where we go and because of that all of the dancers are independent contractors. Every time I’m creating a work, I have to think of money to support that or space to support that.”

The Hermitage Greenfield Prize will allow him to focus on the creative process of a piece he calls “Losing My Religion,” which he said will be a personal look back at the journey he has taken through dance. It also will bring him back to dancing himself, though in a limited way.

“I stopped dancing on stage with my company in about 2000, and the next time on stage was 2014 or '15. By that time, I had severe arthritis in both hips and needed to replace them,” he said. “I have not performed for a while maybe five or seven years, so I feel like this is my last time on stage.”

In addition to Mellilo the dance jury included Charmaine Patricia Warren, artistic director for “Black Dance Stories” and an artistic associate and programming director at BAM, and Michael Novak, who was chosen by Paul Taylor to succeed him as artistic director of the Paul Taylor Dance Foundation.

The finalists were Dormeshia, a tap dancer and choreographed dubbed the “queen of tap” by The New York Times; choreographer Jamar Roberts, who has created work for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, New York City Ballet and more; and Christopher Williams, a choreographer, dancer and puppeteer.

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This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Visual artist and choreographer win 2023 Hermitage Greenfield prizes