The Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize Announces Jurors
Application Deadline Approaching- December 12, 2008
The Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize announces the jurors
for 2009. The panel consists of three accomplished jurors from the art
industry. This year's jurors are Ellen Harvey, Valerie Cassel Oliver and
Elisabeth Sussman. The fourth annual Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize
is designed to assist area visual artists in furthering their careers by
awarding a $25,000 fellowship. The deadline for applications remains open
until Friday, December 12, 2008. The prize will be awarded to an artist or
artist collaborators working in the Baltimore region on July 11, 2009, 7pm
at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
Ellen Harvey is a New York-based artist with an extensive exhibition history
that includes solo shows at the LUXE Gallery(2007); New York, Pennsylvania
Academy of the Fine Arts (2005), Philadelphia; the Whitney Museum at Philip
Morris (2003), New York; and De Chiara Gallery (2000 & 2001), New York. She
has been included in many significant group exhibitions including the
Whitney Biennial 2008; Generation 1.5 at the Queens Museum of Art (2007),
New York; Block Party at the Bellwether gallery (2002), New York; and
Superduper New York at Pierogi 2000 (2000). In 1999, Ms. Harvey
participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study
program, after which she spent the following two years working on her now
famous New York Beautification Project, a brilliantly straight-forward
public art project where she "tagged" already graffiti covered spots with
small 5" x 7" intricately detailed oval landscapes. She has other works in
the public art collections of both New York and Chicago. She has also won
several awards and her artwork has been reviewed often in publications such
as The New York Times, Art in America and New York Magazine. She is
currently represented by LUXE Gallery, New York; Magnus Müller, Berlin;
Galerie Gebr. Lehmann, Dresden, Germany; and Locks Gallery, Philadelphia.
Valerie Cassel Oliver is Curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum
Houston (CAMH), where she has been assembling acclaimed exhibitions since
2001. Included among them are Splat Boom Pow! The Influence of Cartoons in
Contemporary Art (2003), Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since
1970 (2005), Black Light White Noise: Sound and Light in Contemporary Art;
as well as Cinema Remixed and Reloaded. Black Women and the Moving Image
since 1970, which is currently on view at the museum in Houston. She was
also a member of the curatorial team for the 2000 Biennial Exhibition at the
Whitney Museum of American Art. Prior to her tenure at CAMH, she was the
director of the Visiting Artists Program at the School of the Art Institute
of Chicago and curated several lecture series and symposia including
Witness: Art/Activism (1998), Lesbian Identity and the Landscape of
Homophobia (1998), Jurassic Technology (1998), The Performative Object
(1998), Culture of Empire/Culture of Resistance (1998), Reality/Virtual
Reality (1997), and Sound Mining: Unearthing Extended Voice (1996). She has
authored books that accompany a variety of her curatorial projects, and has
served as a program specialist at the National Endowment for the Arts (1988
to 1995).
Elisabeth Sussman is Curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the
Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; where her most recent curatorial
effort William Eggleston: Democratic Camera - Photographs and Video,
1961-2008 is currently on view. Ms. Sussman's remarkable career spans more
than three decades and includes curating or co-curating such seminal
exhibitions as Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes (1993), the 1993 Biennial
Exhibition, Nan Goldin: I'll Be Your Mirror (1996), Keith Haring (1997) and
Gordon Matta-Clark (2007) all at the Whitney Museum of American art; as well
as the landmark retrospectives of the works of Eva Hess (2001), which won
the International Art Critics Association First Prize for the best
monographic exhibition retrospective outside of New York, and Diane Arbus
(2003) for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In addition to authoring
several publications that accompany her curatorial projects, she has
contributed essays to countless other volumes. In 1999 she was a Fellow of
the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy, and a Scholar at the Getty
Research Institute in 2003. She has taught at M.I.T., Tufts and Harvard
Universities.
Deadlines/Dates
Application deadline December 12, 2008
Announcement of semi-finalists February 12, 2009
Announcement of finalists April 14, 2009
Finalist interviews July 11, 2009
Award announcement July 11, 2009, 7pm
BMA exhibition duration June 20 - August 16, 2009
MICA exhibition duration July 17 - August 2, 2009
Artscape July 17-19, 2009
The 2009 Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize is made possible through the
support of The Abell Foundation, Alex. Brown Charitable Foundation,
anonymous, The Henry and Ruth Blaustein Rosenberg Foundation, the
Charlesmead Foundation, Ellen Dankert, the France-Merrick Foundation,
Willard Hackerman c/o Whiting-Turner Contracting, and Legg Mason.
For the 2009 Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize application, visit
www.artscape.org or call 410-752-8632.
Terry Dame & Electric Junkyard Gamelan
Metro Gallery
1700 North Charles St.
Baltimore, Maryland
www.myspace.com/metrogallery
Sunday Dec 7 -- 8 pm FREE!!!!!!
Electric Junkyard Gamelan plays original groove driven music on invented
instruments.
With lilting melodies, syncopated strings, funky bass lines and layers of
interlocking rhythms played on such musical oddities as the Kachapitar, the
Sitello, the Clayrimba, Rubarp, Big Barp and an arsensal of percussion
instruments fashioned from found objects. They produce a fresh new sound
that tantalizes the ears and eyes of all.
free "makeovers" from the series by Sarada Conaway
Framed Reality
December 2-January 31, 2009
Gallery Talk: 6 pm, Friday, December 12 / Reception, 7 pm
Framed Reality, an exhibition featuring the work of four figurative painters who draw inspiration from various sources, including childhood memories, folklore, and narrative. Although distinctly different in their approach and painting styles, each artist’s work will evoke a unique and highly personal response from viewers. Participating artists include: Daniel Finch, Brian Martin, Becky Slemmons, and Nora Sturges.
Daniel Finch appropriates popular imagery from his formative teenage years growing up in the 1970’s to create paintings that reflect on past memories as observed from a current perspective. His large scale works represent modern archetypal characters and events with historic or mythical relevance created by joining pixilated painting segments to reveal such familiar icons as King Kong, Evel Knievel and Bruce Lee. Finch comments, “my paintings are, in great part, a search for the remnants of masculine identity transmitted to me through the media icons of my generation.”
Brian Martin’s paintings are based on memories of growing up in several suburban neighborhoods throughout America. The artist’s perception of these communities as cold and isolated is sharply contrasted to the safe and supportive paradigm intended by these planned neighborhoods. This sentiment is conveyed in the striking paintings he constructs of empty playgrounds and vacant hallways. Martin remarks, “the disparity between this ideal and the actual experience of life in these communities is the focus of my art.”
Becky Slemmons is a narrative painter whose outlet for storytelling is realized through creating art. She says, “the stories we tell, our mythologies, are metaphors for what matters to us, distilled from our experience of being human.” Her most recent work was inspired by folklore and lesser-known customs in which the artist searches for truths throughout multiple cultures. This work draws from a seventeenth century Welsh courting ritual of spoon-giving, which the artist has adapted to incorporate tales of her own invention based on this custom. In order to bring her characters to life in her paintings, Slemmons must fully understand them, often writing down stories, making their costumes and shooting video for reference. This highly personal experience allows the artist to see how each of her fictitious characters might feel in the situations with which they are confronted. Working from video stills, Slemmons captures key cinematic moments to depict in her paintings and in her storytelling.
Nora Sturges’ detailed paintings place contemporary figures in historical period settings. Her rich, small paintings are often inspired by narrative, and are filled with details that exemplify the artist’s whimsical humor, bringing an interesting perspective to imaginary events and situations. In Marco Polo’s Travels, Sturges creates a series of paintings of imaginary adventures which was originally inspired by the narrative and subject matter of Italo Calvino’s novel, Invisible Cities. “The paintings have since grown to encompass personal experience of travel and displacement, as well as ideas taken from the actual Travels of Marco Polo, a book with many contemporary parallels.” Also included in the exhibition is the series, A View from the Road, paintings that represent travel snapshots depicting the memorable and less than memorable things tourists see and choose to document while traveling. Quiet Cities is the third series that will be exhibited, inspired partly by the artist living in Baltimore, it “explores the human inhabitation of the environment and the process of urban growth and decline.”
