CAA has awarded five 2010–11 Professional-Development Fellowships in the Visual Arts to artists enrolled in MFA programs across the United States. The organization has also recognized the work of five additional artists with honorable mentions.
CAA will award each fellow a one-time grant of $5,000. The fellows and honorable mentions will also receive complimentary one-year CAA memberships and free registrations for the 2011 Annual Conference in New York. In addition, Barbara Nesin, president of the CAA Board of Directors, will formally introduce and recognize the ten artists during the presentation of the 2011 Awards for Distinction, which takes place on Thursday evening, February 10, 6:00–7:30 PM, in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
CAA will publish full profiles of all ten artists later this month, with images of their recent work. Initiated in 1993, the fellowship program helps student artists and art historians bridge the gap between their graduate studies and professional careers. It is open to all eligible graduate students in the visual arts.
2010–11 Fellows
Born in Honduras, Alma Leiva is an artist working in photography, film, and installation at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. In her latest series, Celdas (Prison Cells), she builds sets in her studio that she then photographs. These absurd constructions allude to the way in which citizens in Central American, where she often returns to reseach and work, have learned to subsist within violent societies. Her next project, a documentary, will focus on how individuals cope with loss and repression in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
An MFA student at the University of California, San Diego, Sheryl Oring investigates technology and its role in society through projects that incorporate old and new media. Her work tells stories, examines public opinion, encourages civic engagement, and creates platforms for public discussion. Formerly a journalist, Oring uses the tools of that trade––camera, typewriter, pen, interview and archive—to create concept-driven photographic and video installations, performances, artist’s books, and internet-based works.
Working in new media at the University of Illinois, Chicago, Brittany Ransom probes the relationships and differences among humans, animals, and the environment in the form of interactive sculpture, possible prosthetics, wearable recording devices, and digital manipulations. Her artwork invites technology—real and imagined—to heighten a viewer’s awareness of the existence and perspectives of the world from the point of view of other species.
Currently pursuing an MFA in documentary film and video at Stanford University in California, Mina T. Son makes films on an eclectic range of topics, offering a glimpse into underrepresented and rarely seen subjects and individuals. Her thesis film, a short observational film following two Korean students who attend the California School for the Deaf, explores how each navigates the complexities of adolescence and the transition to adulthood in both deaf and Korean cultures. Watch Son’s An Architect’s Vision online at KQED Media.
Amanda Valdez, an MFA student at Hunter College, City University of New York, uses fabric, scissors, a sewing machine, and a frame as ingredients for her current body of work, which she calls Fabric Paintings. Her approach grants her a recycling-based process of invention that plays with images and material from diverse sources. These works also combine her interests in craft and abstraction, encouraging an intimate relationship with shape and line between them while pushing these forms toward the edge of their frame.
Honorable Mentions
The jury also named five artists as honorable mentions: Maria Antelman, who studies photography and video at Columbia University’s School of Fine Arts in New York; Caetlynn Booth, a painter enrolled in the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey; Gregory Hayes, a painter pursuing an MFA at Brooklyn College, City University of New York; Ashley Lyon, an artist working in sculpture and extended media at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond; and Georgia Wall, who creates works in video and performance at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois.
Jury Members
The 2010–11 jury members are: Virginia Derryberry, professor of painting and drawing, University of North Carolina, Asheville; Dianna Frid, assistant professor in studio arts, School of Art and Design, University of Illinois, Chicago; Reni Gower, professor of art, Department of Painting and Printmaking, Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond; Dennis Y. Ichiyama, professor of art and design at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana; and Maria Ann Conelli, executive director of the American Folk Art Museum in New York. As CAA vice president of committees, Conelli is a nonvoting juror.
First image: Sheryl Oring, I Wish to Say, 2010, performance at the 01SJ Biennial in San Jose, California (artwork © Sheryl Oring)
Second image: Brittany Ransom, Only a Mother Could Love, 2008, digital manipulations, 5 x 7 in. (artwork © Brittany Ransom)
