Hilton Als, celebrated writer, theater critic, and Teaching Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of English, has been announced as a recipient of the 2022 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing.
Als is a Pulitzer Prize-winning staff writer and a theater critic for The New Yorker magazine. He is the curator of the recent exhibition, Toni Morrison's Black Book, at the David Zwirner Gallery, New York, and is the author of several books including The Women (1996), White Girls (2013), and Alice Neel, Uptown (2017). Based in New York, Als is a teaching professor at the University of California, Berkeley and an associate professor of writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.
The Clark Prize is funded by the Beinecke Family through the Prospect Hill Foundation. It is accompanied by a $25,000 honorarium and an award designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Tadao Ando, the designer of two buildings on the Clark’s Williamstown campus.
The inaugural Clark Prize was awarded in 2006 to three individuals: Kobena Mercer, educator, writer and critic; Linda Nochlin, art historian and leader in feminist art history studies; and Calvin Tomkins, author and art critic for The New Yorker magazine. In 2008 Peter Schjeldahl, the esteemed art critic for The New Yorker magazine received the prize, followed by art critic and Princeton University professor Hal Foster in 2010; artist, writer, and critic Brian O’Doherty in 2012; poet and writer Eileen Myles in 2015; and art historian and writer Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby in 2017.
Members of the Clark Prize jury were chosen for their long-standing commitment to the arts and their expertise in the field. Jurors serve as both nominators and judges. Individuals engaged in all forms of arts writing, including criticism, commentary, monographs, catalogue essays, and biography, are eligible for nomination.