May 8, 2015

May 8, 2015 was the date the Absolut Art Award, which included a $30,000 purse, was awarded to Frances Starke. About this artist we learn:

Stark has exhibited extensively in Europe and shows in Los Angeles at Marc Foxx. She was the subject of a solo show at the Hammer Museum in 2002 ....A professor at USC, she maintains a studio in Chinatown and lives in South Pasadena with her partner and 7-year-old son. She has published two books, one of collected writings (2003) and the other, "The Architect and the Housewife" (1999), composed of personal essays examining gender-inflected domestic and professional roles. A week after the MIT opening, Stark made her curatorial debut at the Hammer, with "Houseguest: Frances Stark Selects From the Grunwald Collection."

I have read nothing to suggest the cat videos Starke did were a deciding factor in her win. You once could see them here. Where once we copied this:

The Apartment is pleased to present Frances Stark’s Cat Videos 1999-2002. Made in her apartment these simple one-shot videos capture Frances’s cats lounging about their domain to an eccentric soundtrack from Throbbing Grissle to Rossini. Frances Stark has shown widely through out the world with recent solo exhibitions at Portikus (Frankfurt) and the Vienna Succession. Starck was also included in this year’s Whitney Biennial.

You can download some cat videos from her website, but I did not test it. There's a lot of info there.

Somewhere we read:
"The Absolut Art Award was founded in 2009, and is given out every two years. There will be a ceremony for Stark .... in Stockholm in September."