Fine Art faculty member Kerry Tribe was one of five winners of the 2017 Herb Alpert Award. The award is given to “risk-taking mid-career artists working in the fields of dance, film/video, music, theater, and the visual arts,” and includes an unrestricted award of $75,000.

Tribe, who lives and works in Los Angeles, frequently examines the themes of memory, time, and the ethics of representation through a variety of media including multichannel videos, 16-mm films, installations, sculpture, performance, and photography. Her subjects have ranged from an urban river, aphasia, and a butterfly’s wing to a man with a twenty-second memory, the night sky, and her senile grandfather.

“I started out thinking I should try to ‘change the world.’ I don’t know how often art can do that, and I think there are more practical ways to channel one’s energies into social change if that’s the goal. But I do think that the ethics of representation count, and I hope that the representations I make provide opportunities to think critically about topics that matter, free from the demands of more traditional, instrumentalized or commercialized media,” explains Tribe, in conversation with Diana Nawi, associate curator at Pérez Art Museum Miami.

Read the entire interview here.