NEW YORK— Hammer Museum curator James Elaine and Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles are the recipients of the 2008 Ordway Prize, reports the New York Times. The biannual prize, intended as an American counterpart to Britain's Turner Prize, is awarded every two years by the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York and the Creative Link for the Arts (formerly the Penny McCall Foundation) to a midcareer artist, midcareer arts writer, or contemporary art curator. Meireles and Elaine will each receive $100,000. The jury included Creative Link director Jennifer McSweeney, 2006 Ordway recipient Doris Salcedo, Tate Modern director Vicente Todoli, and Hamza Walker, director of education and associate curator at the Renaissance Society, at the University of Chicago.

Meanwhile, Brooklyn artist Xaviera Simmons has won the 2008 David C. Driskell Prize, awarded annually by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta to an emerging or mid-career artist who work "makes an original and important contribution to the field of African American art or art history." The honor comes with $25,000. Simmons is best known for How to Break Your Own Heart: Visitors Welcome, a 2006 installation at Art General in New York for which she created a salon with felted floors and impromptu jazz performances that also traveled to the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston and the Zacheta National Art Gallery in Warsaw. Past winners include scholars Kellie Jones and Franklin Sirmans and artist Willie Cole.