Marta Minujín is granted the Cultural Achievement Award by the Americas Society

Americas Society honored the nearly half-century career of Argentinean artist Marta Minujín with the Americas Society Cultural Achievement Award during an award ceremony held at the institution's historical building in New York City before an audience of over one hundred guests from the cultural, business and political worlds. The event featured a conversation between Minujín and prominent Cuban artist Tania Bruguera. Americas Society and Council of the Americas President and CEO Susan Segal said about the artist, "Marta Minujín is an iconic figure and a major force in the Latin American and global art scene," and added, "We are proud to honor her with the third Americas Society Cultural Achievement Award and celebrate her career, which is as relevant today as it was when we presented her Minucode project in New York, precisely fifty years ago." Commissioned in 1968 by the Center for Inter-American Relations—known today as Americas Society—Marta Minujín's Minucode opened new paths for the exploration of the social codes of four groups of leading figures in the arts, business, fashion, and politics in New York through a series of cocktail parties/happenings that were recorded in films. Organized by Americas Society Visual Arts Director and Chief Curator Gabriela Rangel and José Luis Blondet, the exhibition MINUCODEs revisited the project in 2010, shedding light on the original mythical event through recovered images and documents. Born in Buenos Aires in 1943, Marta Minujín presented her first solo show at the age of 18. In 1960 she traveled to Paris on a grant by the French National Foundation for the Arts. There she directed her seminal action titled La Destrucción (The Destruction) and met artists like Arman, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Christo, and Jean-Jacques Lebel, who helped bring happenings to France. In 1964 she won the Torcuato Di Tella Institute's first prize with her work titled Revuélquese y Viva (Roll Around and Live), a habitable construction covered with mattresses of different colors. With a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1966), Minujín settled in New York, where she began working on a series of works clearly influenced by McLuhan's theories and conceived Minucode, the project revisited in a 2010 exhibition of the same name under the curatorship of Gabriela Rangel at the Americas Society. Minujín maintains a varied and prolific artistic practice that includes sculptures, happenings, and monumental installations in Argentina and other parts of the world. She has been influential to generations of artists and is recognized as one of the most iconic artists from Latin America.