Larry Walker has just been announced as the winner of the 2016 Nexus Award, given by the Atlanta Contemporary.
Walker will be fêted on August 27 in conjunction with the Contemporary’s ART PARTY fundraiser. The Nexus Award is given to individuals, groups, or organizations that have made significant contributions to the contemporary arts landscape in Atlanta and who are instrumental in making an exceptionally vibrant arts community.
Walker, who currently has an exhibition on view in New York at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., curated by his daughter Kara Walker, is Professor Emeritus and former Director of Art and Design at Georgia State University, whose faculty he joined in 1983 as professor and director of the art program. He retired in 2000. He is best known for his semi-abstract mixed-media paintings and collages.
Born in Franklin, Georgia, Walker has had over 40 solo exhibitions and has participated in over 200 group exhibitions since 1971. Among the galleries he has shown with over the years are Atlanta’s Fay Gold and Mason Murer Fine Art. His work is in the collection of the High Museum in Atlanta, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others.
Previous Nexus Award winners:
2015 – Michael Rooks, curator of modern and Contemporary art at the High Museum of Art
2014 – Susan Bridges, founder and director of Whitespace Gallery
2013 – Lucinda Bunnen, photographer, collector, and arts patron
2012 – Lisa Cremin, director of Metropolitan Atlanta Arts Fund of the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta
2011 – Louis Corrigan, founder of Flux Projects and Possible Futures
2010 – Andrea Barnwell Brownlee, director of the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art; and Dr. Jerry Cullum, writer, critic, and poet
