ROB PRUITT | INTERVIEW MAGAZINE

There's great irony in the fact that Rob Pruitt is the man putting together the Guggenheim’s First Annual Art Awards, a sort of tongue-and-cheek version of the Oscars for contemporary American art. It’s the kind of irony more befitting a Hollywood film script than the New York art scene. On October 29, before an assemblage of heavyweights in the Guggenheim Museum rotunda, faux-champagne-bottle-in-ice-bucket lamp awards will be doled out to the winners of Solo Show of the Year, Group Show of the Year, Curator of the Year, and Artist of the Year, among a myriad of other categories. While a committee helped select the nominees, the awards show itself was 45-year-old Pruitt’s brainchild—his way of giving back to the art-world community that has made him one of its own unorthodox, uninhibited stars.

In the late 1980s, the Washington, D.C.–raised Pruitt was, along with Jack Early, part of the collaborative art team Pruitt-Early, a duo that was instantly touted as a pair of intrepid, iconoclastic new­comers—that is, until a 1992 show at Leo Castelli Gallery, where the two artists paid tribute to black culture by splashing paint on foil, shrink-wrapping posters of famous African Americans, and supplying their own rap soundtrack. Today that kind of show wouldn’t read as much of a shock, let alone a scandal, but in the early ’90s, the culture was still fully entrenched in the dicta of political correctness. Protests ensued, their work was accused of being racist, and, soon after, the pair disbanded.
There's great irony in the fact that Rob Pruitt is the man putting together the Guggenheim’s First Annual Art Awards, a sort of tongue-and-cheek version of the Oscars for contemporary American art. It’s the kind of irony more befitting a Hollywood film script than the New York art scene. On October 29, before an assemblage of heavyweights in the Guggenheim Museum rotunda, faux-champagne-bottle-in-ice-bucket lamp awards will be doled out to the winners of Solo Show of the Year, Group Show of the Year, Curator of the Year, and Artist of the Year, among a myriad of other categories. While a committee helped select the nominees, the awards show itself was 45-year-old Pruitt’s brainchild—his way of giving back to the art-world community that has made him one of its own unorthodox, uninhibited stars.

In the late 1980s, the Washington, D.C.–raised Pruitt was, along with Jack Early, part of the collaborative art team Pruitt-Early, a duo that was instantly touted as a pair of intrepid, iconoclastic new­comers—that is, until a 1992 show at Leo Castelli Gallery, where the two artists paid tribute to black culture by splashing paint on foil, shrink-wrapping posters of famous African Americans, and supplying their own rap soundtrack. Today that kind of show wouldn’t read as much of a shock, let alone a scandal, but in the early ’90s, the culture was still fully entrenched in the dicta of political correctness. Protests ensued, their work was accused of being racist, and, soon after, the pair disbanded.

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