Amar Kanwar to Receive $25K Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change

Indian artist Amar Kanwar is the recipient of the 2014 Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change. The $25,000 award is presented annually by New York-based nonprofit arts organization Creative Time to an artist whose work has been devoted to “instigating social awareness and harnessing the communicative power of art to engage communities around important public issues.” New Delhi-based Kanwar plans to use the prize money to advance his ongoing The Sovereign Forest project, which brings together moving and still images, texts, books, music, objects, and seeds, among other things, in an attempt to reopen discussion and initiate a creative response to our understanding of crime, politics, human rights, and ecology.