Awards from American Academy of Arts and Letters

The American Academy of Arts and Letters has announced eight winners of its 2013 art awards. Both established and emerging artists have been honored, and the recipients will split a total of $67,500 in prize money.

New York City-based artists Ellen Berkenblit, Louise Fishman, Judy Linn, Judith Shea and Keith Sonnier have been recognized with $7,500 Arts and Letters Awards in Art. Njideka Akunyili, a Nigerian-born artist now living in New York, received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award in Painting, a $10,000 prize for a "young American painter of distinction."

The 2013 ceremony, set to be held in New York City in May, will also mark the inauguration of the Jacob Lawrence Award and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Award, two new $10,000 prizes presented respectively to Brooklyn-based painter Margrit Lewczuk and New York City's Theo A. Rosenblum.

Chosen from the 34 participants in the "Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts" (on view at the Academy's West 155th Street galleries in New York through Apr. 14), the winners were selected by a committee of Academy members that included Alex Katz, Thomas Nozkowski, Dorothea Rockburne and committee chairman Joel Shapiro. Past recipients have included Joyce Pensato, Jim Campbell and Arlene Shechet.

PHOTO: Works by Ellen Berkenblit and Theo A. Rosenblum, on view at the American Academy of Arts and Letters.