The College Art Association announced yesterday the recipients of its 2009 Awards for Distinction. The Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work went to Mary Heilmann, whose recent retrospective exhibition, “Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone,” curated by Liz Armstrong, opened at the Orange County Museum of Art in California in the spring of 2007 and traveled over the past two years to the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston; the Wexner Center for Arts in Columbus, Ohio; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. The Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement was bestowed on Chris Burden, in recognition of a thirty-year career that began with his now-legendary performance pieces of the early 1970s that tested the limits and endurance of the body. The Distinguished Feminist Award went to the Guerrilla Girls, members of which have “harassed, entertained, shamed, and moved the art world with their direct campaigns that provide statistical information on the inequities of the art world.” (The Guerrilla Girls also won CAA’s Frank Jewett Mather Award in 2004.)

Critics and scholars to receive CAA awards in 2009 include Anthony J. Barbieri-Low, for Artisans in Early Imperial China; Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz, editors of Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds; Phillip Earenfight, editor of A Kiowa’s Odyssey: A Sketchbook from Fort Marion; Marnin Young, for his article from the June 2008 issue of the Art Bulletin; Richard Meyer, for his essay “‘Artists sometimes have feelings’”; and Boris Groys and Georges Didi-Huberman, for their writings on art. Teaching awards went to Roland Reiss, professor emeritus at Claremont Graduate University, and Charles W. Haxthausen, professor at Williams College. Carol Stringari, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Chris McGlinchey, of the Museum of Modern Art, received the CAA’s Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation.