Ellsworth Kelly, George Lucas, Laurie Olin Among National Medal of Arts Recipients

President Obama welcomed the latest recipients of the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal to the White House yesterday for a ceremony in the East Room. Among the honorees present to pick up their hardware was Ellsworth Kelly, who has had a banner ninetieth year, with solo shows at MoMA, the Phillips Collection, the Barnes Foundation, and Matthew Marks, to name a few. The citation read at the ceremony lauded the artist as “a careful observer of form, color, and the natural world [who] has shaped more than half a century of abstraction and remains a vital influence in American art.”