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Professor Warren Lehrer Awarded 2019 Ladislav Sutnar Prize

Writer, designer, multimedia artist, and professor Warren Lehrer was awarded the lifetime achievement award in Pilsen, Czech Republic on November 11, 2019.

Named after the Czech-American design pioneer, the annual award “recognizes individual artists from around the world of outstanding performance in the field of fine arts, especially applied arts and design.” Lehrer received the prize “for his pioneering work in visual literature and design.”

Despite the challenges of working outside and between traditional genres, Lehrer has garnered an international reputation as a polymath and innovator in the overlapping fields of visual literature, design authorship, book arts, graphic design, performance art. In addition to his contribution to these fields, Lehrer was awarded the Sutnar prize for his collaborations “with musicians, actors, filmmakers, technicians, and other authors and artists,” and in recent years, for his “transposition of stories and texts into animation, video and interactive media.”

In 2016, Lehrer was honored by the Center for Book Arts in NYC, as an “innovator and boundary breaker,” and “for extending the often-rarified field of book arts to the broader worlds of contemporary design, art and literature.” He will be having a solo exhibition at the Center for Book Arts January 16 – March 28, 2020.

Lehrer’s newest book, Five Oceans in a Teaspoon, (Paper Crown Press, Sept. 2019), is a collaboration with investigative journalist/poet Dennis J Bernstein comprised of Bernstein’s poems and Lehrer’s typographic visualizations and book structure. Divided into eight movements, the 300-page book reads like a memoir in short visual poems. The book sits at the center of a multibranched project that includes animations, exhibitions (City Lore Gallery & the Center for Book Arts), and performance/readings.

Five Oceans in a Teaspoon Front Cover