Mr. Johnson. (Courtesy PMC)

Atlanta's High Museum of Art has awarded artist Rashid Johnson with its 2012 David C. Driskell Prize, which is presented annually to an artist "in the beginning or middle of his or her career whose work makes an original and important contribution to the field of African American art or art history." Mr. Johnson will receive a $25,000 prize.

In other news involving Mr. Johnson, his latest New York exhibition, "Rumble," closes at the Upper East Side branch of the multinational Hauser & Wirth gallery this weekend, and he is in the running for the Guggenheim's Hugo Boss Prize.

Michael H. Miller profiled the artist last year in the pages of The Observer, and at Art Basel Miami Beach, Gallerist saw him win the first painting ever made by Queensbridge rapper Nas in a mid-concert auction.

"Landscape with Figures: A Scene from ‘The Last of the Mohicans'" by Thomas Cole (1826) (of the Terra Foundation)

Alice Walton's newly opened Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas will join the Louvre, Atlanta's High Museum of Art and the Terra Foundation for American Art in a four-year project to explore four themes in American art. The first exhibition "will explore the birth of American landscape painting through the works of Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand," according to a press release, and will debut in Paris on January 14, before traveling to the other museums.

We reported on a panel on traveling exhibitions like these back in May and Henri Loyrette, president and director of the Louvre, made a comment that may explain the Louvre's participation in such a thoroughly American project:

"We are an American museum," said Mr. Loyrette. "We are the third American museum in the world! We have more American visitors in the Louvre than you have in Philadelphia or Boston."