2011 Infinity Award: Art

Abelardo Morell was born in Havana, Cuba in 1948, and immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1962. He received his undergraduate degree in 1977 from Bowdoin College and an MFA from the Yale University School of Art in 1981, and in 1997 was presented with an honorary degree from Bowdoin College. Morell has received a number of awards, including: a Cintas grant (1992), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1994), a Rappaport Prize (2006), and an Alturas Foundation grant in 2009 to photograph the landscape of West Texas. His work has been collected and shown in over seventy galleries and museums in the U. S. and abroad. Among these are the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Art Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Houston Museum of Art, The Boston Museum of Fine Art, and The Victoria & Albert Museum (London). In 2008, Morell was the Happy and Bob Doran Artist in Residence at the Yale University Art Gallery, where a retrospective of his work, Behind the Seen: The Photographs of Abelardo Morell was on exhibit. Another retrospective, being organized jointly by the Art Institute of Chicago and The J. Paul Getty Museum, will be on view in the summer of 2013. His publications include a photographic illustration of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1998), A Camera in a Room (1995), A Book of Books (2002), Camera Obscura (2004), and Abelardo Morell (2005). More recently, the Museum of Modern Art published a limited edition book of his Cliché Verre images with a text by Oliver Sacks. Shadow of the House, an in-depth documentary about Morell's work and experience as an artist, has just been completed by filmmaker Allie Humenuk.