2023 Individual Support Grant Recipients
The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation has been awarding grants to mature, creative visual artists since 1976. These awards are intended to recognize the talents of many individuals around the world who have dedicated long careers to making art and hopes to alleviate some of the financial burdens on those artists so they can devote more of their time and energies to their creative endeavors.
Each one of the 20 artists whose names and work appear below was awarded a cash grant of $25,000 this year. These individuals were selected from a group of 985 applications from 47 countries by a panel of five advisors who are themselves art professionals and who have no affiliation with the Gottlieb Foundation.
Click on each image to enlarge.
Olga Bergmann
Reykjavik, Iceland
@obergmann5050
Heavenly Body (“Heavenly Bodies” series), 2022
Wood, charred wood, pigments, wax & charcoal
16 x 24 x 8 inches
Olga Bergmann was born in Reykjavik in 1967 to an Icelandic father and a Russian-Jewish mother. This mixed background has been significant in her artistic practice in regard to cultural and aesthetic interests and influences. She studied painting at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and earned an MFA in studio art from the California College of the Arts, where her focus shifted from painting to sculpture and collage. Her work has been exhibited extensively, including at The National Gallery of Iceland and The Reykjavik Art Museum, Bozar in Brussels, The Nordic Biennial Momentum in Norway, and the Mediations Biennale in Poznan, Poland. She has taught at the Art Academy in Iceland, served on the board for the Reykjavik Sculpture Association, and curated shows. She also manages a non-profit, artist-run outdoor gallery in Reykjavik for temporary art projects in public space.
“My ideas and visual language are born out of juxtaposing fragments that relate to history, knowledge, and the natural world. Currently, I am working on wood sculptures made out of discarded tree trunks that I collect. The wood is turned on a lathe and/or shaped with a chainsaw and hand tools, then I add different materials and colors to the wood bodies - drawing on them with charcoal, applying colored wax, scraping the surface, and often putting pieces back on the lathe again - repeating the process several times before assembling the sculpture out of the individual parts, often adding pieces of branches or other details. I call this body of work ‘Heavenly Bodies’.”
Rebecca Bird
Brooklyn, NY
@birdbirdbirdbirdbird
Appetite, 2022
Oil and acrylic on wood
36 x 48 inches
Rebecca Bird received her BFA from the Cooper Union in 2000, followed by a Fulbright Fellowship to research Nihonga painting in Japan. Bird has had solo shows at Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles (2019, 2017, 2015, 2011, 2009), Russell Day Gallery, Everett, WA (2017), Voookhyang, Seoul (2016), William Holman Gallery, New York (2015), Wave Hill, Bronx, NY (2003) and other venues. Her paintings have appeared in the Paris Review and Harper’s Magazine. She is the recipient of numerous grants and residencies. Her work is held in public and private collections including MoMA, NY.
“I began painting daily as a child and continue to do so. Painting presented a means to stop time and escape situations, so it became my primary compulsion. Paints exercise an inexorable hold on me; first watercolor then acrylic, oil, egg tempera, fresco, and Nihonga. Now I compose fluidly between mediums, observing the way pools of paint settle, drips dry, pigment disperses, and affixes itself. Its physics have become familiar. My surfaces are specific, always leaving paper, wood, and canvas visible, embracing the integrity of materials. Construction of female identity, my identity, is a question that runs through all the work. The self-portraits are always shadows or reflections. In the painted reflections the marks on either side can be compared for their imprecise but determined relationship, like different people’s memories of events. The constructed space of these paintings is familiar but unreachable, a site of plausible deniability.”
Danville Chadbourne
San Antonio, TX
Prayer Monument to the Fear of Regeneration, 2022
Wood, acrylic on wood, earthenware, metal
87 x 27 x 27 inches
Danville Chadbourne received his MFA in 1973 from Texas Tech University in Lubbock, TX. After teaching college-level studio art and art history for 17 years, he quit teaching in 1989 to devote himself full-time to his art. His work has been exhibited in over 100 solo shows across the US and is included in numerous private and public collections. In addition to creating public art projects in Texas, New Mexico, and Washington, D.C., he was the featured artist for the West Texas Triangle, a series of simultaneous exhibitions at a consortium of West Texas museums. Chadbourne’s work has been featured in Sculpture Magazine, Ceramics Monthly, and other publications. He has been the recipient of the Dozier Travel Grant (2016), an Individual Artist Support Grant from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation (2019), and artist residencies in Calcutta, India, and Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany. Chadbourne has lived in San Antonio, TX since 1979.
“Essentially, my work is concerned with evoking spiritual or primal states. The works often seem interrelated, part of an unknown culture with an elaborate but undefined mythological structure. Wood is linear, active, dynamic, moving away from gravity with a searching expansiveness. In recent years I have been preoccupied with the inherent character, gesture, and expressive range of wood. As the remnant of a once living, active, and responsive organism, its life history remains. Growth and change are inherent. Using it is my small act of reverence for the natural world, an act of self-reflection and meditation on our shared human condition.”
Anne Marie Grgich
Tacoma, WA
@annemariegrgich
29 Pink Brushes, 2021-2022
Mixed media collage and ephemera on canvas
16 x 24 x 1.50 inches
Anne Grgich’s work has been shown from Portland, Oregon to Australia, France, and Canada, and appeared on clothing by fashion house Comme des Garçons in 2018. Her art has been featured in Raw Vision Magazine, as well as in several books, including Outsider Art: Art Brut & Its Affinities (2022) by Colin Rhodes. She regularly shows at the Outsider Art Fair in New York. Her work is in public and private collections in the U.S., Europe, and Australia. Pursuing her love of supporting other artists, she curated a three-floor exhibition in Shoreline, WA. Grgich continues to work as an artist, collaborator, and curator internationally, chasing her ever-expanding muse from Tacoma, WA.
“I first started making art as a child in the 1960s, but I was catapulted into life as a full-time artist after suffering a traumatic brain injury in 1981. As I recovered from a coma, and mourned the death of my boyfriend in the accident that almost killed me, I turned to art, finding an outlet for both my grief and the confusion caused by the effects of my injury. Much of this was tied up with ruminations about the nature of consciousness and identity, and my early drawings very quickly moved toward what I am most known for, multilayered renderings of human faces that stare into the viewer’s soul. My collage works brought me the opportunity to add layers of mystery and intricacy. To me, these layers are reminiscent of human consciousness, and continue to provide opportunities for representing the mysteries of the human mind.”
Michael Hall
Salt Lake City, UT
June, 2022
Pencil, pastel, oil pastel on paper
42 X 38 inches
Michael Hall was born in 1952 in Lafayette, Indiana. He graduated from the Art Academy of Cincinnati in 1974. Aiming to separate himself from the culture of school and colleagues, he decided to move to Chicago with the intention of getting a studio and a job and do as much work as possible while being lost in the middle of several million anonymous people. It was a very successful time. For six years, he drew every day, creating hundreds of drawings, before moving on and establishing the same routine, first in Southern California and then in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he started to show his work and was affiliated with Phillips Gallery for many years.
“What is it that occurs at that singular moment of 'present' when the eye sees a line emerging? The body and mind are always becoming more themselves with a new line, image, color at each instant continually. It is a procession of points becoming a line and a life. These points recede as new ones occur to increase or create a line themselves, a constant motion forward. The action continues and I see the drawing emerge. I see the city or the meal or the person in front of me. I see the art and the seeing is the art. I create the object as much as the object creates me.“
Ronald Hall
Brooklyn, NY
@ronaldhallstudios
Madams of the Black Ether, 2022
Acrylic on canvas
20 x 18 inches
Ronald Hall creates otherworldly spaces in which figures engage in and reflect upon the past, present, and future. Shifting between fiction and nonfiction, his narrative paintings distort domestic interiors, plantations, and other environmental structures into eerie dreamscapes that invoke historical and contemporary issues involving race and social constructionism. Hall is a native of Pittsburgh where he attended the High School for Creative and Performing Arts, before studying at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work has been exhibited in galleries and art museums internationally. Hall has been the recipient of a Bronx Museum of the Arts AIM Fellowship in 2015, a Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2016 and a Sharpe Walentas Studio Program residency, and the inaugural Phillip Pearlstein Painter Award in 2020/21.
“As an artist, I am deeply inspired by African American history and the rich cultural traditions that have shaped it. In my work, I seek to explore the complexities and contradictions of this history, as well as the ongoing struggles and triumphs of the African American experience. Currently, I'm working on a series of African American figurative paintings that explores the intersection of surrealism, art history, and technology. In this series, I am using the surrealist tradition of irrational juxtapositions and dreamlike imagery to challenge and subvert traditional art historical narratives and representations of African Americans. I am also incorporating elements of popular culture and technology, using digital media and new forms of expression to create works that are both rooted in the past and forward-looking.”
Meg Hitchcock
Lake Peekskill, NY
@meghitchcocksteger
The Ferryman, 2022
Letters cut from the Kabbalah to create the Sukhavati Sutra, acrylic paint, graphite on paper
20 x 16 inches
Meg Hitchcock’s work with sacred texts is an expression of her lifelong interest in religion, psychology, and literature. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and studied classical painting in Florence, Italy. She writes the art blog “IN THEIR STUDIOS: Conversations with Women Artists”, where she talks with women artists about art, creativity, and inspiration. Hitchcock’s work was included in exhibitions at Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, AK and at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA. She was an artist-in-residence at the Foundation of Spirituality and the Arts in Charleston, SC.
“I started working with sacred texts in 2007, cutting letters from one text to form the writings of another. In one piece I cut letters from the Bible to create a passage from the Koran, in another I cut letters from the Koran to create a passage from the Bhagavad Gita, and so on. This “cross-pollination” of holy books has a larger purpose – namely, it suggests that all sacred writings point toward the same, ultimate source, eliminating the need for exclusivity or intervention. In the “Illuminated Manuscripts” series, I combine sacred texts with painting, sewing, and burning, rendering a contemporary interpretation of an ancient tradition. But instead of illuminating a long-established, patriarchal religion, I illuminate the state of awareness. This state of being, found at the heart of spiritual traditions, is the origin and destination of all religions.”
Susannah Israel
Oakland, CA
@thecolorsculptor
Asphalt & Honey: Painter, 2022
Terracotta, mixed media
29 x 18 x 15 inches
Susannah Israel's gritty yet passionate view of humanity is drawn from city life. Born in 1954 in New York City, she attended Pratt Art Institute on scholarship as a high school senior. She was certified as one of the first women paramedics in San Francisco in 1980 and earned her BA in Art and Chemistry (1987) and her MFA (2000) at San Francisco State University. Her work is widely exhibited and held in collections in the US and around the world. Career distinctions include awards from the Center for Cultural Innovation, US Artists, NCECA, Fletcher Challenge Premier Award, and Virginia Groot Foundation, among others. Selected residencies include the Oregon Coast School of Art, Archie Bray Foundation, Mendocino Art Center, Black Bean Studios, Jentel Foundation, Boise VASP, and Mission Clay Art & Industry.
“I am an artist and activist in east Oakland, California. My practice is anchored in figurative sculpture, and my intention is to provoke responses of recognition and reflection. “Asphalt & Honey” (2022) re-engages with a world in turmoil, hearing gunshots and sirens all night, and people living in abandoned cars. It is an autobiographical, socio-political art intervention about life in post-industrial Oakland. Asphalt is the gritty surface on which we land, hard. It’s an ever-present reminder of mortality, a final resting place. Its creatures are rats and pigeons. Honey is sweetness, intoxication, and passion, flowers in cement, sunset through barbed wire. Abstracted and architectonic, the sculpted figures stand in for live bodies, and the environment is graphically represented on their skins.”
Michael Aaron Lee
Woodside, NY
@3dmikelee
Every Picture Tells A Story, 2022
Graphite and metallic gouache on paper and wood construction
26 x 28 x 2.25 inches
Michael Aaron Lee holds a BFA from the University of Texas, Austin, and an MFA from Hunter College, New York. He has exhibited extensively, most recently in “Confluence: Tradition in Contemporary Art”, which traveled to China and Scotland. He has been published in New York Magazine and Hyperallergic, among others. For over ten years, Lee co-curated the monthly “Artist Lecture Series.” In 2021 he began “Hudson Presents: Conversations with Contemporary Artists,” which is live-streamed by Hudson County Community College (HCCC). Lee is an adjunct professor of art at HCCC and Montclair State University, NJ. He was awarded residencies from the Cooper Union and the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop and is featured in the White Columns flat file program. His work will be the subject of two New York-area solo exhibitions in 2023.
“Borrowing patterns and pictorial forms from decorative art and craft traditions, my current work often resembles picture frames, badges or emblems—those things that memorialize, commemorate or signify a particular allegiance. Ancient human forms such as masks and altars mingle with poker cards and advertising imagery, Morse code, and classic American pop song lyrics. This intentional mash-up of culturally and chronologically diverse ingredients is composed in symmetrical or grid-like arrangements to echo traditional crafts like quilting but also to stress its status as information to be read—even if parsing definitive meaning remains elusive. My project is shaped by a desire to build a personal lexicon as well as an effort to understand how our public narratives and mythologies are shared through visual language.”
Honglei Li
Queens, NY
@honglei.li.painting
Asian American Mythology: No Escape on the 40th Road, 2022
Oil on canvas
48 x 48 inches
Honglei Li has worked in the field of oil painting for three decades. His artworks have been exhibited around the globe, including at the Whitney Museum, Queens Museum, ICA Boston, Musée Guimet in Paris, Museum of Ara Pacis in Rome, and Shanghai University Gallery in China. Honglei has been the recipient of grants and awards from the Museum of Arts & Design, Creative Capital, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Queens Council on the Arts, and the Korea Art Forum, among others. Honglei’s work has been discussed by many prominent art historians and featured in many contemporary art publications.
“Since emigrating to the States in 2000, I have witnessed endless stories of Asian immigrants, their tragedies, struggles, pain, or joy. These real-life stories of my friends, colleagues, family, and community members have been forever engraved in my memory and heart. Yet, through the course of studying Western contemporary art, I realized there have been very few artworks addressing the experience of this group of people, rendering them invisible in the American arts and cultural landscape. Bringing light to a blind spot in contemporary art, I am motivated to create art projects directly depicting the lives of Asian immigrants who remain struggling at the bottom of American society. Taking a bold approach to integrating Eastern and Western visual languages, my painting aims at creating a new style that belongs to the multicultural society of the 21st century and connects different groups through the communicative power of visual arts.”
Sangram Majumdar
Seattle, Washington
@sangram_majumdar
The Meeting, 2022
Oil on canvas
78 x 63 inches
Sangram Majumdar was born in Kolkata, India. He holds a BFA from RISD and an MFA from Indiana University. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, and London and has been reviewed in Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, and Hyperallergic, among others. He has received numerous grants, awards, and residencies and, in 2019, was inducted into the National Academy of Design. Since 2021, he has been an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. From 2003 to 2021, he was a full-time painting faculty at the Maryland Institute College of Art. In January 2024 he will have his first solo exhibition in India at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke in Mumbai.
“Over the last twenty years, I have been making paintings that inhabit and personify a place between ‘what was’ and ‘what’s next’. The imagery has shifted from observed quotidian subjects to staged interiors to bodies in motion. I work on the paintings until they begin to feel like places embedded with time, where the old and the new coexist. More recently, the figure has taken on a more urgent role in my work, shapeshifting between appearing or assembling as a person, a character, a body, or a symbol. I adopt abstraction as a strategy to reinforce a permanent state of ambiguity resulting from obscurity, indistinctness, or imagery. I am pulling from my personal biography, my immediate surroundings, and a broader Indian heritage of art and storytelling. Painting becomes a zone where subjectivity matters and where identity is constantly being remade.”
Amy Myers
Brooklyn, NY
@amymyersstudio
Hydromelodic Event, 2022
Oil on canvas
60 x 60 inches
Amy Myers’ large-scale drawings and paintings simultaneously reference particle physics, biology, philosophy, and the human mind. Myers has received numerous grants and residencies, including The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Maison Dora Maar, Yaddo, and The American Academy in Rome. In addition to solo exhibitions at Mary Boone Gallery (New York, NY), Suzanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Rhona Hoffman Gallery (Chicago, IL), and Talley Dunn Gallery, (Dallas, TX) her work has been shown in many museums and is in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Pérez Art Museum, Miami, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. Publications that have cited her work include The New York Times, Artforum, Hyperallergic, ARTnews, and BOMB.
The work explores premises such as the unseen world of molecules and atoms, the laws that govern their interaction, coupled with the exposure to ideas concerning scientific experimentation within the notion that everything is a combination of something else. Each body of work begins with research into visual complexity and the unpredictable nature of the universe. Over time, a symbolic language evolves which function as substructures of the composition. These systems help navigate both elements of time and complexity in the work. Symmetry is at the heart of the studio practice since all particles in the universe are spinning, creating an inherent visual symmetry. Compositions are slightly off-center, creating a dynamic spatial relationship between the artwork and the audience, which in turn allows the composition to maintain its inherent motion.
Susan Osgood
Brattleboro, VT
@susanosgoodvt
Rust River, 2022
Oil on canvas
24 x 30 inches
Susan Osgood graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with honors in 1978 and has focused on painting, drawing, and printmaking ever since. A 1993 Pollock-Krasner Foundation award allowed her to live and work in New York City, and the culminating body of work eventually traveled from 1993-2005 to exhibition venues throughout Germany. Osgood has received awards from the Puffin Foundation, the Vermont Council on the Arts, and the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, among others. Since 1985, she has spent winters examining and drawing the carved reliefs of ancient sites in Luxor, Egypt, for the University of Chicago’s Epigraphic Survey Project.
“In 2008, I became fascinated with an ancient upside-down map of seemingly impossible geography. Even though in its time it was considered accurate for some three hundred years, I saw only lines—delicate, curving, changing course—dancing from page to page. Seeing the map as a wonderfully enigmatic abstraction rekindled my interest in the absolute grace and beauty of line. The tattered early topographic maps of the desert, blueprinted drawings of ancient Egyptian temple graffiti, pigments ground from desert stones, and ink of black walnuts, have all become catalysts for series of artwork. For me, painting and drawing are forms of travel, giving the sense of being in unfamiliar territory and experiencing the wonder of discovery. The aim for my art is to move the viewer to be curious, step out of this busy world, follow fluid lines, and delve into the place of not knowing—suspended in the timelessness of infinite possibility.”
Hélène Pavlopoùlou
Athens, Greece
@helenepavlopoulou
Voltaire and Assange in an Arcadian Forest, 2022
Acrylic, oil on prepared canvas
63 x 95 inches
Hélène Pavlopoùlou studied painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts. Her work is in many public and private collections and has been shown in 14 solo exhibitions, as well as in art fairs and biennials worldwide. She collaborates with the State Museums of Contemporary Art of Greece (MOMus) in Thessaloniki on international exhibitions. Last year, Pavlopoùlou had an artist residency at the Schütz Museum in Austria which will result in a future solo show. She is represented in Greece by Alexandros Donopoulos International Fine Arts. She is working on a new project for a 2023/24 exhibition in Naples, Italy.
“My work takes an allegorical, philosophical, and poetic approach to the theme of nature. I was initially influenced by the Greek Islands as symbols and metaphors of the mystical heritage of the Aegean Sea. Other paintings revolve around vessels and boats to represent the archetypal and mythical meaning of sea travel as a way of transporting human dreams and transforming life. Another recurring subject is the horse, often in combination with fragments of other subjects, including broken statues or figures of mystery or paradox. Surrealism is always a good way to explore the unconscious and to represent new images of contemporary life. Horses are archetypes of the psyche, the soul. My new project combines these various themes. Now nature is a spiritual blue and trees and forests form the background, the theatrical scene of the players. There are also references to the universe: Earth is reflected in the cosmic order, underlining the human responsibility to historical memory.”
Sashirekha Rajashekar
Bangalore, India
@the_drawing.room
A Day in Mumbai, 2022
Oil on canvas
97.2 x 69.6 inches
Sashirekha Rajashekar has been a practicing visual artist for the last 28 years. She studied at Chitrakala Parishat, College of Fine Arts, Bangalore, and has been featured in many group and solo exhibitions in Chennai, Bangalore, and Goa. In 2022, she completed her Master’s degree in painting at the Chitrakala Parishat evening college, Bangalore, with first-class distinction.
“I worked with collage for years creating layers using paper and colored images from magazines and then the process made me realize that the same could happen in painting where I could pick and choose every element that goes into the narrative. Now I’m creating the same layers in painting on a larger scale since large-size works give me more space for composition which is very important to me. My paintings have become layers of life experiences where I’m witnessing more and more clarity, purpose, and focus. The past is fading into the background and the present is pushing into the foreground to be more on the forefront to start something fresh and purposeful. Sometimes it’s my work making me think and at times what I’m thinking is transforming into my work. Some of the images I see on a day-to-day basis are connecting me to memories within me, awakening them, reconnecting me to them, and then they become a part of my visual narrative. The images are a combination of humans, animals, buildings, temples, and domes, which are all integral parts of society.
Chris Rush
Tucson, AZ
@thelightyearsbook
King, 2022
Oil on copper
14 x 16 inches
Chris Rush’s work has been exhibited in galleries and museums across the U.S., including Etherton Gallery, the Tucson Museum of Art, and The Phoenix Art Museum. For the City of Tucson, he created twenty portraits of people living in the culturally diverse downtown area. Rush is the recipient of fellowships from Art Matters, The Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, The Phoenix Art Museum, and The Puffin Foundation, as well as artist residencies in New Mexico, New York, and Italy. His work has been written about by Luis Camnitzer in Drawing Papers 28 (The Drawing Center, NY), by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson in Staring, and in the essay collection Re-Presenting Disability: Activism and Agency in the Museum. His memoir The Light Years is published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
“25 years ago, I began to focus on unconventional, non-commissioned portraits. This led to a long-term project called “The Lost Portraits.” The subjects of many of these works were individuals with physical or mental disabilities. This was a life-changing experience and redefined my ideas and values in regard to portraiture. Classical portraiture has always been the domain of a privileged class. Even now, the art form largely remains a celebration of physical perfection and beauty, of pride and power. To depict individuals formerly deemed unworthy of portraiture subverts the conventional aims of the art form. Recently, I’ve also been drawing and painting on found paper and other found objects, such as old chalkboards and signage, using these surfaces to help ground my efforts in the rusticity of everyday life.”
David Scher
New York, NY
@davidcscher
Village, 2022
Mixed media on paper
30 x 44 inches
David Scher has been working toward being an artist since early childhood. At age 10, he became Sia Armajani's sole pupil for 4 years, from 1962 to 1966. That has been the entirety of his art education, as he stopped schooling at 17. To support his work in art and music, he has worked as a self-employed carpenter, contractor, and graphic designer for 50 years. He has been fortunate to have had representation in the USA and Europe for 30 years with many years of collaborations, performances, and exhibitions.
“The major theme in my work has been a lifelong dedication to drawing and all of its uses. I have become a pencil at this point. Drawing has led me into work in many fields and countless subjects. My work as a builder, a designer, a cartoonist, a political agitator, a graffitist, a sculptor, a photographer, an animator, a painter, and a clarinetist have all been made possible through drawing. I have always been on the lookout for holes in the fence, unexamined long-held contradictions, and roads not taken. I am currently working on several projects, including large drawings that are musical and purely visual scores for either the ear or the eye. In these works, the drawing is both a "recording" of the hand's movement and a score for the interpretation of the performer or viewer. These scores will be animated and performed by my musical ensemble as well.”
Tracey Snelling
Berlin, Germany
@trraceysnelling
Disaster-Proof Mobile Unit (sculpture project with over 200 University of Michigan students; clients from the Delonis Center and Freighthouse Day Shelter, Ypsilanti; and families from the shelter for New Americans, Hamtramck), 2022
Mixed media sculptural installation with lights
120 x 50 x 25 inches
Tracey Snelling (born 1970, Oakland, California; lives and works in Berlin, Germany) has exhibited at The Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels; Palazzo Reale, Milan; The Museum of Arts and Design, New York; El Museo de Arte de Banco de la Republica, Bogota; The Stenersen Museet, Oslo, Baltimore Museum of Art, and Kunstmuseen Krefeld, among others. Her large-scale installation Woman on the Run was originally commissioned by Selfridges, London during Frieze 2008, and has traveled to venues throughout the U.S. Snelling was awarded a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 2016, the Foundwork Art Prize in 2020, and the 2022 Working Scholarship from the Stiftung Kunstfonds, Germany. Snelling showed in the Venice Biennale and in the Havana Biennale in 2019. She recently completed residencies at the University of Michigan and in Tokyo, Japan, and has upcoming exhibitions in Tokyo, Berlin, and Munich.
“Through the use of sculpture, installation, video, and photography, I give my impression of a place, its people, and their experience. Often, the cinematic image stands in for real life as it plays out behind windows in the buildings, sometimes creating a sense of mystery, other times stressing the mundane. My work derives from voyeurism and geographical and architectural location. Within this idea of location, themes develop that transport observation into the realm of storytelling, with reality and sociological study being the focus. My core skill as an artist is to capture the essence of time and place, engaging with my surroundings and merging its residents, localities, and atmospheric peculiarities into my work.”
Bert Yarborough
Truro, MA
@beryar
Offering, 2022
Acrylic, Flashe, gouache, ink, and reactive dyes on grommeted canvas
72 x 60 inches
Bert Yarborough has a degree in Architecture from Clemson University and an MA and MFA in Photography from the University of Iowa. As the Sonia C. Davidow ’56 Endowed Chair in the Fine and Performing Arts at Colby-Sawyer College, New London, NH, he taught painting and drawing and served as the gallery director. He was a two-year Resident Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, where he also served as Visual Arts Program Coordinator, Chairman of the Visual Committee, and a member of the Board of Trustees. He has received two NH State Arts Council Grants in Painting, an NEA Fellowship in Sculpture, a Fulbright Fellowship to Nigeria, and a Visual Arts Residency Fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Umbria, Italy. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is included in the collections of the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, NH, Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, NH, the Boston Public Library, and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art in Ithaca, NY. He is represented by the Berta Walker Gallery in Provincetown, MA, and resides in Truro, MA.
“My current work presents a merging of many personal, significant visual experiences and places. I continue to employ and expand the mark-making language honed through over 40 years of working in the landscape of Provincetown, an engagement with ritual and symbolic iconography absorbed in Nigeria, and the creation of forms incorporating aspects of the Medieval geological depictions of landscapes and mountain formations.”
A Recipient Wishing to Remain Anonymous