Judd-Hume Prize and residency announced for art writers, philosophers and architects

University of Edinburgh has announced the formation of a new international fellowship and prize, named in honour of American artist Donald Judd and Scottish philosopher David Hume.

The £30,000 grant will be awarded each year to an art writer, philosopher or architect. The recipient will be invited to take up a research fellowship post at University of Edinburgh starting in March 2017 under the remit of researching and writing on an unexplored aspect related to the theoretical overlap between Judd and Hume’s work and the fields of visual art and philosophy.

“The purpose is to produce new thinking, unavailable elsewhere," explains Peter Ballantine, a leading expert on American sculptor Donald Judd and the brainchild behind the new scheme. He hopes for the programme to use Judd and Hume as a launchpad through which to investigate what he calls, “seriously neglected topics…abstraction, image, precognition, object-ness, function.”

Architect Gottfried Boehm, professor emeritus at University of Basel, is to be the first grantee, and will take up the post in March. A symposium in May, and the subsequent publication of Boehm’s research will follow.

He will be succeeded by Alva Noë, University of California at Berkeley professor of philosophy, who has been selected in advance as the programme’s second recipient in the following year.