The Bush Foundation, an MCF member, recently announced the 2010 recipients of their Enduring Vision Awards. Unique in the United States, the award of $100,000 is given annually to three artists in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota who have at least 25 years of continued work. The grant provides support during a time of life when artists are often most productive, yet least supported by grantmakers.
A study recently noted by science writer Jonah Lehrer, and picked up in an article at MinnPost.com, shows that the Bush Foundation might just be on to something here. According to Dean Simonton, psychologist at UC-Davis, there’s an interesting inverted “U-curve” pattern that appears when you graph the age at which people are most creative across a number of disciplines. The peak of that U-curve occurs at different ages depending on the type of work.
Creative breakthroughs in fields like physics and poetry, for instance, tend to happen most commonly when individuals are in their late twenties. Crafts that have fundamentals that are loosely defined, and therefore require repetition and refinement, however, tend to peak later. Novelists and biologists tend to reach the zenith of their creative ability in their late forties.
The work of Lakota visual artist Arthur D. Amiotte, Laotian textile artist Bounxou Daoheuang Chanthraphone and European American photographer Paul Shambroom, the 2010 Enduring Vision recipients, seem to show that this trend towards better work later in life occurs in the visual arts as well.
You can learn more about the Enduring Vision award, and past grantees at the Bush Fellows website. Or if you’d like to see a list of many other artists who produced their best work at forty and beyond, read Susan Perry’s article at MinnPost.com.
- Cary Lenore Walski, MCF web communications associate
