The Foundation for Contemporary Arts is pleased to announce the winner of the John Cage Award for 2012. Selected by the Directors of the Foundation, this year's recipient is Pauline Oliveros (Kingston, NY).
 
The John Cage Award is made biennially in recognition of outstanding achievement in the arts for work that reflects the spirit of John Cage.  This prestigious $50,000 award was established in 1992 in honor of the late composer, one of FCA's founders.  The selection is made from invited nominations.
 
Ms. Oliveros is a senior figure in contemporary American music and founder of the Deep Listening Institute.  Since the 1960s, she has worked with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual.  Oliveros represented the U.S. at the 1970 World's Fair in Osaka, Japan, and was honored in 1985 with a retrospective at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC.  She is a Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a Darius Milhaud Composer-in-Residence at Mills College in Oakland, CA.

Founded and guided by artists, FCA's mission is to encourage, sponsor and promote innovative work in the arts created and presented by individuals, groups and organizations. Artists working in dance, music/sound, performance art/theater, poetry and the visual arts are awarded nonrestrictive grants to use at their own discretion; arts organizations receive project or general operating support by application and a fund is maintained to help artists with work-related emergencies. Since FCA's inception in 1963, nearly 900 artists have donated work to raise funds for these grants. The current Directors of the Foundation are: Brooke Alexander, Frances Fergusson, Agnes Gund, Jasper Johns, Julian Lethbridge, Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker and T.J. Wilcox

John Cage Award