Alex Katz awarded National Medal of Arts

Alex Katz studied at the Cooper Union School of Art, New York, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine. Over a career spanning 70 years, Katz has become best known for his large-scale figure and landscape paintings that capture the spirit and dynamism of American culture from the post-war period to the present. In addition to oil painting on linen, Katz also makes painted aluminum cutouts, has an extensive drawing practice, and is a prolific printmaker. Music and dance, and jazz in particular, have been central to Katz’s esthetic since the beginning. Poetry, both classical and contemporary, has also played a pivotal role in how he views the world. In the 1950’s, Katz began collaborating with the poets of the New York School, including Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch, and he has made portraits of many others. Katz has frequently worked with choreographers and dancers, designing sets and costumes, most notably in a 50-year collaboration with Paul Taylor Dance Company. He continues to portray the imagery and movements of dancers to this day. Katz has engaged in numerous public art projects, from his 1977 billboard in Times Square, to a large permanent cutout sculpture at Chicago’s Harlem Station (1984), to his installation of 19 large-scale works on glass for the New York City Subway (2019). In 2022, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York presented a nine-decade overview of Katz’s career, filling the entire Frank Lloyd Wright structure. In 2024, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented Alex Katz: Seasons, an exhibition of the artist’s recent, experimental, environmental paintings. A room at Vienna’s Albertina Museum is devoted to his work, and there is a wing devoted to Katz’s work at the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine.