Academy Award-winning actor Robert De Niro hosted a reception on February 25, 2014, honoring painter Catherine Murphy as the third recipient of the Robert De Niro Sr. Prize, a $25,000 annual award for mid-career American painters. The event took place at De Niro's Greenwich Hotel in New York, with previous winners Stanley Whitney (2012) and Joyce Pensato (2013) in attendance, along with jury members including Lindsay Pollock, Susan Davidson, Peter Plagens, and Robert Storr.
The prize, administered by the Tribeca Film Institute, is named after Robert De Niro Sr., an Abstract Expressionist painter whose work is held by major institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum. The award highlights the often-overlooked legacy of the elder De Niro while providing significant recognition and financial support to established but not yet household-name painters, reinforcing the importance of mid-career artists in the contemporary art world.