| Issue #48, March 9, 2007 |
Guild Hall’s 2007 Lifetime Achievement Awards
by Victoria L. Cooper
On March 19, Guild Hall will celebrate its 22nd Annual Academy of the Arts Lifetime Achievement Awards Gala at the Rainbow Room in Manhattan. The four winners of the Lifetime Achievement Awards are: Mercedes Ruehl (for performing arts), John Chamberlain (for visual arts), Paul Goldberger (for literary arts) and Roy Furman (for philanthropy and leaderships endeavors in the arts).
Due to the wealth of talent in the literary, performing and visual arts communities on the East End, the Guild Hall Board of Trustees officially created the Academy of the Arts in 1986. Since its inception, the membership of the Academy of the Arts has grown a gathering of over 200 of the world’s most recognized artists.
In the past, names like Alec Balwin, April Gornik, Steven Speilberg, Billy Joel, Lauren Bacall, Paul Simon, Wendy Wasserstein, Ben Bradleee and Betty Friedan have been on the list of Guild Hall’s lifetime honorees in the performing, literary and visual arts. This year, Marshall Brickman of Montauk, a writer, entertainer and director, who and recently co-wrote the Tony-nominated Jersey Boys, will be the master of ceremonies.
Mercedes Ruehl, who resides in East Hampton, launched her career in theatre and then earned to big-screen status in Jonathan Demme’s Married to the Mob. She won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe and the Los Angeles and Chicago Film Critics Society Award for her role in The Fisher King. She gave another award-winning performance, this time in the play Lost in Yonkers, for which she earned a Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and the Helen Hayes Award.
She has received numerous nominations and other Broadway credits, and has appeared in various television series such as “Entourage,” “Frasier,” “Law and Order” and “The Cosby Show.” For the past two summers, Ruehl starred as artist Frida Kahlo in the staged reading of Viva La Vida, which received a standing ovation at Guild Hall’s John Drew Theatre in 2005 and received rave reviews at the Bay Street Theatre in 2006.
John Chamberlain, a resident of Shelter Island, is best known for his sculptures of crushed automobiles, such as the piece that is currently on display as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. Chamberlain’s work was widely acclaimed in the early 1960s, when his sculpture was included in the Art of Assemblage exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Instead of creating something new using raw materials, Chamberlain was often found demolishing something already in existence. He experimented with different mediums and, from 1963 to 1965, made geometric paintings using sprayed automobile paint. He is a two-time recipient of a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which he used to begin making a series of rolled, folded and tied urethane foam sculptures, followed by a series of melted or crushed metal and heat-crumpled Plexiglas works. Chamberlain’s fascination with everyday objects has made his sense of style unique. Recently, his work has been in exhibitions at the Atlanta High Museum of Contemporary Art, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Guild Hall, the Parrish Art Museum and galleries in London and Switzerland.
Paul Goldberger, who lives in Amagansett, is a writer who has been awarded honorary doctoral degrees by Pratt Institute, the University of Miami, Kenyon College, the College of Creative Studies, and the New York School of Interior Design for his work as a critic and cultural design commentator. Goldberger is the architecture critic for The New Yorker, where he writes the magazine’s celebrated “Sky Line” column. In 1984, his architecture criticism was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism, the highest critics’ award in journalism.
He is the author of several books, most recently his chronicle of rebuilding Ground Zero titled UP FROM ZERO: Politics, Architecture, and the Rebuilding of New York, which was named one of the New York Times’ Notable Books of 2004. Goldberger also lectures around the country on design and historic preservation and has taught at both the Yale School of Architecture and the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served as a special consultant and advisor on many planning boards for several major cultural and educational institutions. These include the Morgan Library in New York, the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Harvard University in Cambridge and Cornell University in Ithaca.
Roy Furman, who lives in East Hampton, is the Vice President of Jefferies & Company and Chairman of Jeffries Capital Partners, a group of private equity funds. He was previously Vice Chairman of ING Barings for two years, following his year as CEO of Livent, Inc., a leading theatre owner and producer. Furman has been one of the most revered analysts and investment bankers in the entertainment industry, advising a wide range of public and private companies. He is the Vice Chairman of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Chairman Emeritus of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Vice President of the New York City Opera, and a trustee of Guild Hall. Furman has helped produced many plays and musicals on Broadway and his credits include co-producing The Color Purple, The Odd Couple, The Wedding Singer, and Tony Award-winning Best Play, The History Boys. Recently, he co-produced the Tony Award-winning Best Musical, Spamalot. Guild Hall, which just celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2006, is a staple on the East End. It has provided the community with a cultural center for art, entertainment, education and inspiration. It is important to distinguish and recognize those people who help make the programming at Guild Hall possible and the Academy of the Arts Gala is just the place to do it.
– Victoria L. Cooper
The Rainbow Room is located on the 65th floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City. Cocktails will be served at 6:30 p.m., with dinner at 7:30 p.m. The awards ceremony and performances will follow. You can still buy individual tickets, reserve tables of ten or purchase a Young Patrons’ introductory ticket (21 to 40 years of age) by contacting Carole Dioguardi, Director of Development at Guild Hall, via email at carole@guildhall.org.
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