The Dallas Museum of Art has announced 16 recipients of the 2010 Awards to Artists. The program consists of two awards, the Clare Hart DeGolyer Memorial Fund, which gives financial grants to young artists from Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, or Colorado between the ages of 15 and 25 years, and the Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund, open to Texas artists over 30. In addition, the DMA has added the Otis and Velma Davis Dozier Travel Grant this year. Since their establishment in 1980, the funds have dolled out a hefty $500,000. Some local names that pop out: Rachel Cox, Clayton Hurt, Alfredo Salazar-Caro, and Billy Zinser. According to the list, Zinser is going to use the DMA to take his rather odd MACODONS big. Looking forward to that. The full release after the jump.
(Image: Billy Zinser’s MACODONS)
With 16 New Recipients, the Combined Awards Programs Have Given
More Than 230 Artists over $500,000 Since 1980
The Dallas Museum of Art is pleased to announce its 2010 Awards to Artists. This year, sixteen artists received one of three awards. The Museum’s annual awards were established in 1980 by the Clare Hart DeGolyer Memorial Fund and the Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund to recognize exceptional talent and potential in young visual artists who show a commitment to continuing their artistic endeavors. The Clare Hart DeGolyer Memorial Fund is awarded to artists between 15 and 25 years of age who reside in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona or Colorado, while the Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund is open to residents of Texas under the age of 30. The two funds have awarded over $450,000 to artists since their founding.
The DMA also announces the 2010 travel grants. In 1990, the Otis and Velma Davis Dozier Travel Grant was created to honor the memory of Dallas artists Otis and Velma Dozier, who strongly believed in the enriching influence of travel on an artist’s work. The grant seeks to recognize exceptional talent in professional artists who wish to expand their artistic horizons through domestic or foreign travel and is awarded to professional artists at least 30 years of age who reside in Texas. Since the fund’s development, the Otis and Velma Davis Dozier Travel Grant has given over $130,000.
The seven 2010 Clare Hart DeGolyer Memorial Fund Award recipients:
- Courtney Brown is interested in the relationship between ancient rituals and contemporary art making. She reinterprets Native American traditions through ritual-based performances and preserves the remnants as sculptural items. She is currently working toward a B.F.A. at the University of Texas at Arlington and will use the award funds to finance a week-long performance project exploring the Dakota Sioux’s medicine wheel rituals.
- Rachel Brownlee is an interdisciplinary artist who will complete her B.A. at San Antonio’s Trinity University this year. She will use the funds to create a visual environment that mimics the process of sound perception, combining elements of sculpture, cinema, and audio recording.
- Tamara Joy Hunt is a candidate for a B.F.A. in Studio Art and a B.A. in Art History at The University of Texas at Austin, and her work addresses ideas of temporality, postmodernist sculpture, and artistic identity. With the award, Hunt plans to retrace artist Robert Smithson’s footsteps through Yucatan, Mexico, in his seminal work Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan.
- Nicole Loehr draws on her undergraduate studies in Communications Design, Photography, and Psychology at the University of North Texas to create “exaggerated portraits” that illustrate various aspects of the human condition. She will continue a series of portraits she began in 2008 that explore the Bipolar I disorder and will begin a new series following the themes of the mythological character Icarus.
- Chelsey Mulnix’s paintings extend beyond their surface. She incorporates fabric collage elements into her portraits, thus demanding that viewers reconsider the materiality and orientation of the works. She is currently completing a B.F.A. in Drawing and Painting from the University of North Texas.
- Melisa Oporto uses photography to examine the role objects play in defining an individual’s perceived identity. She will graduate from the University of North Texas this spring and will use the award funds to further develop a longstanding series, La Familia Oporto, which investigates the social implications of her family’s personal possessions.
- John Osburn is a multidisciplinary artist modeling new relationships between music and dance. He received his B.A. in Music from Texas Women’s University and will be attending Queen’s University Belfast in Ireland next year to complete a M.A. in Sonic Arts. John will use the award funds to orchestrate a community-based, collaborative project combining sound, dance, and the visual arts that will be performed in Denton this summer.
The seven 2010 Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund Award recipients:
- Sonya Berg presents a contemporary view of landscape using images of swimming pools and waterfalls as metaphors for containment, control of the landscape, and the void. She is an M.F.A. candidate at the University of Texas at Austin and earned a B.A. from Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania. She will use the award funds to pursue her current series of paintings and drawings by researching and photographing local and non-local empty municipal swimming pools.
- Rachel Cox uses photography to explore identity, place, and material culture. Over the past year, this interest has manifested itself in a series of photographs depicting densely packed domestic space that show her largely hidden beneath artifacts of past and present inhabitants. She will use the Kimbrough Award to produce this series, Assimilation, at a previously unattainable scale. Cox graduated from the University of North Texas with a B.F.A in Photography in 2006 and has previously received the Museum’s Clare Hart DeGolyer Memorial Award.
- Jasmyne Graybill creates site-specific installations and sculptures that explore the relationship between nature and domestic spaces. Inspired by familiar parasitic forms like fungus, lichen, mold, and barnacles, Graybill sculpts fictional organisms that infest and overtake domestic architectural spaces. This body of work is an interesting extension from her academic training in Painting and Drawing, for which she earned an M.F.A. from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2008 and a B.F.A. from the University of North Texas.
- Clayton Hurt earned his M.F.A. in Sculpture from Texas Christian University in 2007 and a B.F.A. from the University of North Texas. While his post-graduate work dealt with animal forms and their relationships to the commercial food industry, Hurt intends to embark on a new project exploring the realms of interactive art. He plans to bring together a variety of games and physical environments to create a new kind of experience, one in which the viewer watches, waits, and engages with the physical objects.
- Alfredo Salazar-Caro’s artwork tackles questions of cultural identity. His current body of work combines video, sculpture, and installation to create subtle critiques of human nature. He intends to develop large-scale mixed media projects involving video and sculpture. Salazar-Caro is a past recipient of the Clare Hart DeGolyer Memorial Award and is currently pursuing a B.F.A. in Sculpture from Brookhaven College.
- Trey Wright combines and manipulates photographs to create artificial scenes of urban landscapes, alluding to humanity’s tendency to shape and exert influence over its surroundings. Wright will further develop his current body of work, Islands. He earned his B.F.A. in Photography from the University of North Texas in 2009 and is a past recipient of the Clare Hart DeGolyer Memorial Award.
- Billy Zinser’s art practice revolves around the self-invented cartoon characters MACODRONS, which he produces in a variety of media. These animated shapes evolved out of Zinser’s non-objective experimentation with color, line, and shape. He will use the award funds to explore various incarnations for his MACODRONS, including large-scale public installation projects and claymation video distributed over the Internet. Zinser earned his B.F.A. in Painting and Printmaking from the University of Texas at Austin in 2005.
The two 2010 Otis and Velma Davis Dozier Travel Grant recipients:
- Wura-Natasha Ogunji is an Austin-based video and performance artist who uses physical actions of the body as a way to understand place, land, history, memory, and her own family. Of Nigerian descent, Ogunji grew up in America and her only connection to Yoruba culture is through her body and knowledge of her ancestry. With the Dozier Travel Grant, Ogunji will travel to Nigeria for three months to engage with the original site of her artistic narratives. Ogunji has exhibited at Exit Art, New York; Arthouse, Austin; and the Oakland Museum of California, among other institutions and has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Brooklyn Arts Council. She earned an M.F.A. in Photography from San Jose State University and a B.A. in Anthropology from Stanford University.
- Jeremy Smith is a self-taught cartoonist who finds meaning in mundane moments and articulates them through image and text. He will use the Dozier Travel Grant to visit New York City and collaborate with Al Columbia, a professional cartoonist whom he greatly admires, exposing Smith to a new level of expertise and techniques. Smith has exhibited at The Public Trust and Art Prostitute galleries in Dallas, among others, and was a recipient of the Xerix Grant in 2007, which enabled him to publish his first book, Ropeburn.
Awards to Artists grants have been awarded to more than 230 recipients, many of whom have gone on to successful careers within North Texas and across the country. Over the years, the DMA has acquired works from many of the artists who have received awards from the DeGolyer, Kimbrough and Dozier funds. DeGolyer artists include Jeff Elrod, Misty Keasler and Robyn O’Neil. Kimbrough artists include David Bates, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Lawrence Lee, Melissa Miller, Robert Pruitt, Michael Miller, Erick Swenson and Kelli Connell. Dozier artists include Helen Altman, Annette Lawrence, Scott Barber, Joseph Havel, Katrina Moorhead, Ludwig Schwarz and John Pomara.
About the Dallas Museum of Art
Located in the vibrant Arts District of downtown Dallas, Texas, the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) ranks among the leading art institutions in the country and is distinguished by its innovative exhibitions and groundbreaking educational programs. At the heart of the Museum and its programs are its encyclopedic collections, which encompass more than 24,000 works and span 5,000 years of history, representing a full range of world cultures. Established in 1903, the Museum today welcomes more than 600,000 visitors annually and acts as a catalyst for community creativity, engaging people of all ages and backgrounds with a diverse spectrum of programming, from exhibitions and lectures to concerts, literary readings, and dramatic and dance presentations.
The Dallas Museum of Art is supported in part by the generosity of Museum members and donors and by the citizens of Dallas through the City of Dallas/Office of Cultural Affairs and the Texas Commission on the Arts.
