2010 Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize
The 2010 Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize is supported by The Abell Foundation, Alex. Brown Charitable Foundation, The Henry and Ruth Blaustein Rosenberg Foundation, Charlesmead Foundation, Ellen Dankert, France-Merrick Foundation, Willard Hackerman, Legg Mason, Under Armour Baltimore Marathon/ Corrigan Sports and Anonymous.
THE APPLICATION DEADLINE HAS PASSED FOR THE 2010 PRIZE.
The fifth annual Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize announces the jurors for 2010. The panel consists of three accomplished jurors from the art industry. This year’s jurors are Robert Nickas, Magdalena Sawon and Hamza Walker. The Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize is designed to assist visual artist or visual artist collaborators working in the Greater Baltimore region by awarding a $25,000 fellowship. The Application deadline was Friday, December 18, 2009, 5pm. The prize is in conjunction with the annual Artscape juried exhibition and is produced with The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) and Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).
Approximately six finalists will be reviewed for the prize. Their work will be shown in the Alvin and Fanny B. Thalheimer Galleries of The Baltimore Museum of Art, located at 10 Art Museum Drive. In addition, an exhibition of the semi-finalists’ work will be shown during the Artscape weekend in the Decker and Meyerhoff galleries of the Maryland Institute College of Art, located at 1303 W. Mount Royal Avenue. The prize is part of Artscape, America’s largest free celebration of the arts, taking place Friday, July 16 through Sunday, July 18, 2010 on Mount Royal Avenue and North Charles Street.
The fellowship winner will be selected after a review of the art installed at the BMA and an interview with each finalist by the jurors. The remaining finalists not selected for the fellowship will each receive a $1,000 honorarium. Artist collaborators will receive a single $25,000 prize if chosen as the winner or a $1,000 honorarium that will be equally divided among the members of the group.
Jurors
Robert Nickas is an independent New York-based curator, writer and art critic; who over the past 25 years has organized more than 80 exhibitions that have been shown in museums and galleries throughout the world. Responsible for Aperto at the Venice Biennale in 1993 and the 2003 Biennale de Lyon, his most recent exhibition Cave Paintings premiered in July in Berlin at PSM Gallery, and was produced in October and November in New York by Grisham’s Ghost at 511 West 25th Street in Manhattan. This exhibition is an accompaniment to his latest book, Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting (October 2009); a remarkable volume that highlights the current work of 80 contemporary artists. A regular contributor to Artforum and a founding editor of Index magazine, he has also authored countless essays in exhibition catalogues and artists’ monographs. His other books include two collections of his writings, Live Free or Die (2000) and Theft is Vision (2007). From 2003 to 2006, he served as curatorial advisor at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York.
Magdalena Sawon is the owner and director of Postmasters Gallery in New York. Begun in December 1984 in the East Village, Postmasters Gallery relocated to Soho in 1989, and moved to its current 4,000 sq. ft. ground floor space in Chelsea in September 1998. Postmasters Gallery is one of the few commercial galleries that actively seeks both young and established artists working with new technologies to create their work. This emphasis began with their, at the time, unique and now seminal exhibition in 1996, Can you digit?; which was comprised of approximately 30 monitors arranged in a boat-like shape, each showing a singular digital work. Along with artists working in video and new media, Postmasters Gallery’s current roster of artists includes those working in painting, sculpture and installation. Ms. Sawon has also served on Rhizome’s Board of Directors from 2002 until 2005, a New York-based organization whose mission is to support the creation, presentation, preservation and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage new technologies.
Hamza Walker, who grew up in Baltimore, has been the director of education and associate curator of the Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago, a non-collecting museum devoted to contemporary art, since 1994. Prior to his current position, he held the post of public art coordinator in Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs. His curatorial projects include the exhibitions Several Silences; Black Is, Black Ain’t; Meanwhile in Bagdad; All the Pretty Corpses; A Perfect Union…More or Less and New Video, New Europe, among several others. He has written for the journals Trans, New Art Examiner, Parkett and Artforum; as well as contributed catalogue essays for several artists including Rebecca Morris, Thomas Hirschhorn and Katharina Grosse. He was the recipient of the 1999 Norton Curatorial Grant, the Menil Collection’s 2005 Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement, and is a finalist in the Curator/Arts Writer category for the New Museum’s 2010 Ordway Prize. He is among the graduate faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently on the board of The Chicago Public Art Group.
DEADLINES/DATES
Application deadline- Friday, December 18, 2009
Announcement of semi-finalists- Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Announcement of finalists- Tuesday, April 13, 2010
BMA exhibition duration- Saturday, June 19, 2010 through Sunday, August 1, 2010
Finalist interviews- Saturday, July 10, 2010
Award announcement- Saturday, July 10, 2010 at 7pm
Artscape- July 16-18, 2010
Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize
The Artscape prize is named in honor of Janet and Walter Sondheim who have been instrumental in creating the Baltimore City that exists today. Walter Sondheim, Jr. had been one of Baltimore’s most important civic leaders for over 50 years. His accomplishments included oversight of the desegregation of the Baltimore City Public Schools in 1954 when he was president of the Board of School Commissioners of Baltimore City. Later, he was deeply involved in the development of Charles Center and the Inner Harbor. He continued to be active in civic and educational activities in the city and state and served as the senior advisor to the Greater Baltimore Committee until his death in February 2007.
Janet Sondheim danced with the pioneering Denishawn Dancers, a legendary dance troupe founded by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. Later, she turned to teaching where she spent 15 years at the Children’s Guild working with severely emotionally disturbed children. After retirement, she was a volunteer tutor at Highlandtown Elementary School. She married Walter in 1934, and they were together until her death in 1992.
