Thomas J. Lax Receives the Menil Collection’s 2015 Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement

Thomas J. Lax, an associate curator in MoMA’s department of media and performance art, has won the seventh Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement. The award, given every two years, comes with a stipend of $20,000. Lax will also deliver a public lecture at the Menil Collection in the fall.

Lax spoke at DiverseWorks on April 1 of this year about When the Stars begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South, a group show he curated in 2014 at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The exhibition investigated the category of “outsider” art in relation to contemporary art and black life, and included artists who share an interest in the American South.

The jury for this year’s Walter Hopps Award included Carlos Basualdo (the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs curator of contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and curator at MAXXI, Rome), Melissa Chiu (director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden), and Helen Molesworth (chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles).

Photo credit: Paul Mpagi Sepuya