Ada Award

The Ada Award is designed to support the purchase of significant works by mid-career women artists in the UK.

Contemporary Art Society Museum Members are invited to apply to the Ada Award, a CAS Special Project that was established with the ambition of re-positing women artists within the canon of British art history, who for reasons of prevailing fashions or perceived difficulty of their chosen media, have been omitted from public collections up to this point.

The Ada Award is designed to support the purchase of significant works by later-career women artists in the UK. Artists will have a track record of exhibiting and critical recognition but be under represented in public collections. The award is for existing work and applications are welcome for work in all media, including more difficult to collect work, such as performance and film.

In its inaugural year, the Ada Award acquired a series of 12 photocopied monoprints from the series Love, Sex and Romance (1984) by Rita Keegan for Tate. Keegan (born 1949) is a highly significant, and, until recently overlooked artist, who has not been represented widely in public collections in the UK, despite having been a key figure in the UK’s Black Arts Movement in the 1980s.

To set up an appointment for a conversation about the Ada Award with a member of Contemporary Art Society’s curatorial staff please contact: info@contemporaryartsociety.org