New York, NY- The 2011 Tribeca Film Festival (TFF) announced nine of the major contemporary artists who will contribute their artwork to the TFF 2011 Artists Awards Program, sponsored by CHANEL. Works by Robert De Niro Sr., Inka Essenhigh, Stephen Hannock, Mark Innerst, Tom Otterness, Will Ryman, Clifford Ross, Taryn Simon and Nate Lowman will be presented to the filmmakers whose films are selected by the TFF jury as winners in their respective categories. Additional artists contributing to the Artists Awards Program will be announced in upcoming weeks. The Tribeca Film Festival Artists Awards Program was created by TFF co-founder Jane Rosenthal to celebrate New York artists. This year's TFF will run April 20 - May 1, 2011.

• Robert De Niro, Sr. (1922-1993) was part of the celebrated New York School of post-war American artists. His work blended abstract and expressionist styles of painting with traditional representational subject matter, bridging the divide between European modernism and abstract expressionism. He studied at the renowned Black Mountain College under Josef Albers from 1939 to 1940 and later with Hans Hofmann in New York and Provincetown through 1942. In 1945, De Niro was included in a group exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery in New York, and he had his first solo exhibition there the following year. In 1968, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He continued to exhibit during his lifetime at galleries and museums throughout the United States. His work is included in numerous public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 2009, a retrospective of his work was presented at the Matisse Museum in Nice, France.

• Inka Essenhigh studied at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio and the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has held solo exhibitions around the world, including at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London, Centro de Arte de Salamanca in Spain, Sint-Lukas Galerie in Brussels, Galleria Il Capricorno in Venice, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami, and The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh. She has also had solo shows at 303 Gallery, Mary Boone Gallery, Michael Steinberg Fine Art, Deitch Projects, Stefan Stux Gallery, and La Mama La Galleria in New York. She has participated in group exhibitions throughout the U.S. and abroad, including MoMA, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum für Neue kunst in Germany, Von der Heydt-Museum in Denmark, Ben Brown Fine Arts in London, and Bienal de Sao Paulo in Brazil. Her work is held
  in the public collections of P.S.1 Center for Contemporary Art/MoMA, Seattle Art Museum, Denver Art Museum,
  Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Tate Gallery in London.

·         Stephen Hannock is an American luminist painter known for his atmospheric landscapes and incendiary nocturnes. He has demonstrated a keen appreciation for the quality of light and for the limitations of conventional materials and techniques for capturing it. His experiments with machine-polishing the surfaces of his paintings give a trademark luminous quality to his work. The larger vistas also incorporate diaristic text that weaves throughout the composition. His design of visual effects for the 1998 film What Dreams May Come won an Academy Award®. His works are in collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Hannock recently received an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Bowdoin College.

• Mark Innerst - Mark Innerst is a painter who transforms the urban landscape, investing it with deeply resonant beauty and complexity. Cities like New York and Philadelphia appear alternately majestic, immense, and serene, as streetscapes morph into a series of skyward-shooting lines or stacked, layered blocks of color. Vanishing points slip off-center, displaced by buildings that curve overhead or sweep downward to street level, where human activity is reduced to blurs of light and movement. Innerst lives and works in Philadelphia and Cape May. After graduating from Kutztown State College in Pennsylvania in 1980, he moved to New York City, where he interned at The Kitchen and Artists Space, and began to pursue his career. Since then, he has exhibited widely and has had one-person shows at several museums, including the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Albright Knox Museum, and Indianapolis Museum of Art, among others. Innerst is represented by DC Moore Gallery, New York.

·        Nate Lowman was born in Las Vegas in 1979. He studied art at NYU and is known for installations, sculptures, and paintings that combine found objects, banal mass culture motifs, and media imagery in a manufactured collage aesthetic. In 2010 he curated Al Qaeda Is the CIA, a retrospective of the artist Sue Williams at 303 Gallery in New York, exhibited with Karla Black at Andrea Rosen in New York, and participated in group exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo in Paris and New York's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and New Museum. Most recently Lowman has shown work in Come As You Are Again, a two-person exhibition with Hanna Liden at Salon 94 in New York, and Bed Bugs, a collaboration with Rob Pruitt at Gavin Brown's Enterprise in New York. His work is found in major collections in the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo, and the Guggenheim in New York. Solo exhibitions include The Natriot Act (2009) at the Fearnley in Oslo, A Dog From Every County at Maccarone Inc. in New York (2009), Axis of Praxis: Nate Lowman at Midway Contemporary Art Center in Minneapolis (2006), and The End and Other American Pastimes at Maccarone Inc. in New York (2005).

• Tom Otterness is considered one of the premier public artists working in the United States. Otterness' stylized bronze figures combine into sculptural ensembles that explore the range of human experience, from grand ambition to common foibles, plucking imagery and themes from popular culture and subtly transforming them into humorous commentary. In
  2005-6, Tom Otterness had major exhibitions in New York, Indianapolis, Beverly Hills, and Grand Rapids. He also created an animation and audio feature that screened at the Indianapolis 500 Motor Speedway. Otterness is the first contemporary artist to be invited to create a helium balloon for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Among his recent commissions are the Silver Towers Playground on 42nd Street and an installation in Seoul, South Korea. In 2004, Otterness' renowned sculpture Head was included in MoMA's Sculpture Garden. He also has a large-scale work for the Beelden aan Zee Museum in the Netherlands and he is well known for Life Underground in the MTA 14th Street A/C/E subway station. Sculptures by Tom Otterness are in the collections of MoMA and The Whitney Museum, among others. In 2006-7, Otterness had solo exhibitions at Marlborough Gallery in Monaco and New York, and his newest solo show opens at Marlborough Gallery in February 2011.

·        Clifford Ross began his career as a painter and sculptor after graduating from Yale in 1974 with a BA in both art and art history. In 1995, he turned his attention toward photography and other media. Clifford invented and patented the "R1" camera in 2002 and made some of the highest resolution large-scale landscapes in the world. His work is in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. His book of photographs, Wave Music (Aperture 2005), includes an essay by philosopher Arthur Danto and an interview by novelist A.M. Homes.  He is represented by Sonnabend Gallery, New York. In 2009, a 10-year survey of his photographic work was exhibited at the Austin Museum of Art, and an exhibition of his Mountain and Hurricane series opened at the MADRE/Museo Archeologico in Naples. His work was also shown at Robilant + Voena Galleries in London and Milan, and Sonnabend Gallery in New York. His current work includes a stained glass wall for the new federal courthouse in Austin, Texas and he recently completed Harmonium Mountain, an animated, computer-generated landscape video with an original score by Philip Glass.

• Will Ryman was born in New York City.  His most recent work, The Roses, is an outdoor public art installation on the Park Avenue Malls from 57^th to 67^th streets in New York City.  The site-specific installation consists of 38 sculptures of vividly colored pink and red rose blossoms, some towering as high as 25 feet, complimented by 20 individual rose petals scattered randomly on the median malls.  Ryman's work has been exhibited internationally, including at solo shows at 7 World Trade Center, New York; Marlborough Gallery, New York; The Saatchi Gallery, London; Galerie Bernd Kluser, Munich; Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert Inc., New York and group exhibitions at the Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, Florida; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; Marlborough Chelsea, New York; The Saatchi Gallery, London; Cheim & Read, New York; and P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York, among others.  Ryman's recent work, The Dinner Party (2010) was on view at The Margulies Collection at The Warehouse in Miami and at Paul Kasmin Gallery's booth, both during Art Basel Miami Beach 2010.  A writer turned artist, Ryman's work is also heavily influenced by the works of absurdist playwrights and philosophers.  He is represented by Paul Kasmin Gallery.

·         Taryn Simon was born in New York in 1975. Her most recent work, Contraband, provides a visual guide to global desire in the 1,075 photographs of items detained or seized from passengers and mail entering the United States from abroad. Her previous work, An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, reveals that which is integral to America's foundation, mythology and daily functioning, but remains inaccessible or unknown to a public audience. The Innocents documents cases of wrongful conviction in the U.S., bringing into question photography?s function as a credible witness and arbiter of justice. Simon?s photographs have been exhibited internationally, including solo shows at: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum Fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; and Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. Permanent collections include: The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Tate Modern; the Whitney; Centre Pompidou; and Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. She is a graduate of Brown University and a Guggenheim Fellow. Her photography and writing have been featured in The New York Times Magazine, Ted.com, CNN, BBC, and Frontline among others. Simon is currently working on a global project that will be exhibited and published in spring 2011 at the Tate Modern, London and the Neue Nationalegalerie, Berlin. She will also be exhibiting a new work at the Venice Biennale 2011.

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