Thirty-five years ago, Guild Hall’s board of trustees honored Kurt Vonnegut, Willem de Kooning, and Alan Alda, inaugurating a tradition that has been carried forward ever since by the Guild Hall Academy of the Arts and its annual lifetime achievement awards.
This year’s honorees, Salman Rushdie, Dorothea Rockburne, Barry Sonnenfeld, and Ted Hartley, will be celebrated on March 3 at the Rainbow Room in Manhattan. Eric Fischl, the academy’s president, will host the evening, and Adam Green, the theater critic for Vogue magazine, will serve as M.C.
Mr. Rushdie, who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2007, is the author of 14 novels, including “Midnight’s Children,” which not only won the Booker Prize but was also named the best novel of all Booker winners on the 40th anniversary of the prize. “Quichotte,” his most recent novel, was shortlisted for the 2019 Booker. Currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University, he will receive the award for literary arts from Taryn Simon, an interdisciplinary artist.
Ms. Rockburne will be given the award for excellence in visual arts by Richard Armstrong, the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. After coming to prominence in the late 1960s with works that used such materials as sheet metal, chipboard, and crude oil, she expanded her early minimalist vocabulary with investigations of mathematics, astronomy, and cosmology. Her work is in the collections of important museums and private collections throughout the world. In 2011 she had her first retrospective, at the Parrish Art Museum.
“The Addams Family,” “Get Shorty,” and “Men in Black” are among the blockbuster films directed by Mr. Sonnenfeld, who will receive the award in the performing arts category from Kelly Ripa, the talk show host. Before his directorial debut, Mr. Sonnenfeld was director of photography on films by the Coen Brothers, Rob Reiner, Penny Marshall, and Frank Perry, among others. He received a Prime Time Emmy for his direction of an episode of the television comedy “Pushing Daisies,” and his recently completed memoir will be published on March 10.
Mr. Hartley will receive the special award for leadership and philanthropy from Alec Baldwin. A Navy pilot, actor, investment banker, writer, producer, movie studio head, and, with his late wife, Dina Merrill, a philanthropist, Mr. Hartley has most recently established himself as a painter. He is a board member of the Steadman-Hawkins Sports Medicine Foundation and founder, with Ms. Merrill, of the Story Project, which promotes literacy among inner-city youth, and of the Hartley-Merrill International Screenwriting Award.
Tickets to the awards dinner are $1,500, $500 for those 21 to 40 years old.
