Grants

Grant Recipients in 2004

almaraz $20,000

Carlos Almaraz1941-1989

Note
National Hispanic Cultural Center
Location
Albuquerque, NM

$20,000 toward the acquisition of a major work from the painter’s car crash series for the museum’s permanent collection, overseen by director Helen Lucero and museum curator Andrew Conners. Mexican-born, Almaraz worked in Los Angeles and New York and was a major influence on the development of the Chicano art movement. The fiery narratives from his car crash series are powerful, deeply pigmented paintings depicting turbulent urban landscapes.

blaine $10,000

Nell Blaine1922-1996

Note
Jersey City Museum
Location
Jersey City, NJ

$10,000 toward the acquisition of either a painting or suite of works on paper by the artist for the museum’s permanent collection, overseen by director Marion Grzesiak and museum curator Rocio Aranda-Alvarado. Born in Richmond, VA, Blaine moved to New York in 1942 where she began her career as an abstract painter and in 1957 was featured in Life magazine as one of five leading young female American artists. Influenced by a trip to Paris in 1950, Blaine created landscapes and still-lifes in a colorful, painterly style that explore a dialogue between abstraction and representation.

bluhm $7,500

Norman Bluhm1921-1999

Note
Parrish Art Museum
Location
Southampton, NY

$7,500 toward the acquisition of the 1965 painting Waterloo, for the museum’s permanent collection, overseen by museum curator Alicia Longwell. Bluhm served as a pilot during World War II, after which he abandoned his studies of architecture to pursue painting in both Paris and New York. Bluhm created gestural abstractions that evolved into symmetrically composed paintings with volumous shapes and colors, referencing internal caverns and organs of the body.

bubley $10,000

Esther Bubley1921-1998

Note
Estate of Esther Bubley
Location
Brooklyn, NY

$10,000 for the travel and research costs associated with producing a book on the photojournalist, organized by Jean Bubley and archivist Tracy Schmid. This book will be written by photo-historian Bonnie Yochelson and published by Aperture Foundation. Bubley was a leading photojournalist between the 1940s and the 1960s and worked for the United States government, Standard Oil, and magazines such as Life, Ladies Home Journal, and Look. Described by some as a quiet observer, Bubley captured many poignant and private moments of children, city life, and hospital environments as well as hauntingly striking photographs of oil rigs.

creecy $10,000

Herbert Creecy1939-2003

Note
Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia
Location
Atlanta, GA

$10,000 to photograph and film the painter’s work and studio in preparation for a DVD, overseen by museum director Annette Cone-Skelton. An important figure to Southern abstract art, Creecy lived and worked in Georgia where he taught at the Atlanta College of Art and the University of Georgia. His large expressionistic works are painted with exuberant gestures of multi-colored layers and squiggles that often reference either landscape, nature, current events, or feelings.

dashiell $10,000

David Cannon Dashiell1952-1993

Note
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Location
San Francisco, CA

$10,000 toward Queer Mysteries Revisited: David Cannon Dashiell, an exhibition on the painter with accompanying pamphlet and educational programs, organized by museum curator René de Guzman. Dashiell, whose work explored issues surrounding gay culture and the AIDS epidemic, was born in Tokyo and later moved to California where, in the mid 1970s, he attended CalArts in Valencia. Painting in bold, flat and crisp strokes, Dashiell developed a complex and satirical style that incorporated the seemingly disparate fields of commercial animation with classical mythology and archeology.

dowd $7,500

Robert Dowd1937-1996

Note
College for Creative Studies - Center Galleries
Location
Detroit, MI

$7,500 toward a retrospective exhibition on the painter with accompanying catalogue and public programs, organized by director Michelle Perron and guest curator Ron Morosan. Dowd grew up in Detroit, MI and later lived and worked on both the East and West coasts. His larger than life paintings of currency, stamps, and other official American documents are painted with a pop style and play with words and symbols while functioning as subversive portraits of money and power.

finkelstein $10,000

Louis Finkelstein1923-2000

Note
Kresge Art Museum - Michigan State University
Location
East Lansing, MI

$10,000 toward the acquisition of the 1998 painting Two Figures, Two Heads for the museum’s permanent collection, overseen by museum curator April Kingsley. Finkelstein studied painting at Cooper Union, The Art Students’ League, and the Brooklyn Museum School where he later taught. He also taught at Philadelphia College of Art, Yale University, and Queens College. Finkelstein painted brightly colored abstractions drawn from direct observation of landscapes, architecture, and figures in a highly-energized, expressionistic style.

grippe $10,000

Peter Grippe1912-2002

Note
Rose Art Museum - Brandeis University
Location
Waltham, MA

$10,000 toward Space, Time and Metaphor, an exhibition with accompanying catalogue on the sculptor, organized by director Joseph D. Ketner II and guest-curator Anita C. Gross. Grippe attended Albright-Knox Art School and the Art Institute of Buffalo, NY before moving to New York City in 1936. In his work, Grippe explored issues of space and time through cubist-inspired terra cotta sculptures and new techniques that he developed in lost-wax bronze casting. Grippe was a Professor of Fine Arts at Brandeis University between 1953-1980.

house $15,000

Conrad House1956-2001

Note
Jonson Gallery - University of New Mexico
Location
Albuquerque, NM

$15,000 toward a traveling retrospective exhibition on the artist with an accompanying catalogue, organized by museum curator Robert Ware and guest curator Joyce Szabo, in consultation with John Bridges, director of the Conrad House Estate. Born in Rehoboth, NM, House was raised on the Diné (Navajo) Nation in both Arizona and New Mexico. Both his paintings and sculptural work seamlessly blend influences from Navajo-Oneida tribal traditions with European and American modernism through their bold expression of color, pattern, and form.

kadish $10,000

Reuben Kadish1913-1992

Note
Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center
Location
East Hampton, NY

$10,000 toward Reuben Kadish: Metamorphosis, an exhibition on the artist with accompanying catalogue, organized by director Helen A. Harrison, in consultation with Judd Tully, chairman of The Reuben Kadish Art Foundation. Kadish grew up in Los Angeles and later worked in New York City. Kadish was both a painter and sculptor; his many-faceted career included producing a WPA mural and serving as a combat artist in WWII. His imagery, in which forms often take on multiple guises, reflects his interest in mythology, tribal art, and religious symbolism, intensified from his experiences of war.

mehring $10,000

Howard Mehring1931-1978

Note
Contemporary Museum
Location
Honolulu, Hi

$10,000 to acquire one or two major paintings by the artist for the museum’s permanent collection, overseen by museum curator James Jensen. Born in Washington, DC, Mehring was an important member of the Washington Color School in the late 1950s and 1960s. Made from a variety of painting techniques that employed pouring, staining and layering, Mehring’s early work explores color in an overall pattern, while his later work represents geometric forms created through the recombining of letters of the alphabet.

michels $15,000

Doug Michels1943-2003

Note
Berkeley Art Museum - University of California Berkeley
Location
Berkeley, CA

$15,000 toward Ant Farm (1968-1978), a traveling exhibition on the artist and his collaborators with accompanying catalogue and public programs, organized by BAM/PFA curators Constance Lewallen and Steve Seid. Born in Seattle, Michels studied at Yale School of Architecture and was a founding member of the artist collective Ant Farm. Michels created many elaborate drawings and collages that helped to realize various projects, one of which was Cadillac Ranch, a 1974 outdoor sculptural work in Amarillo, TX consisting of 10 used Cadillacs plunged nose-first into the ground.

mullican $25,000

Lee Mullican1919-1998

Note
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Location
Los Angeles, CA

$25,000 toward a traveling exhibition on the painter/sculptor with accompanying catalogue and public programs, organized by museum curator Carol S. Eliel. Mullican served as a topographical draftsman during WWII, and in 1952 moved to Southern California where he taught at the University of Southern California and University of California, Los Angeles. Referencing Byzantine icons, Paleolithic figures, Surrealism, and Native American art and culture, his detailed abstractions made from repetitive brushmarks burst with shamanistic energy.

rigsby $10,000

John David Rigsby1934-1993

Note
Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver
Location
Denver, CO

$10,000 toward Dots, Blobs & Angels: John David Rigsby, 1950-1993, a retrospective exhibition on the painter/sculptor, with accompanying catalogue and educational programs, organized by director/curator Cydney Payton. Originally from Alabama, Rigsby worked and exhibited in Tunisia, New York, South Carolina, Colorado and Texas. Using a personal iconography that colorfully incorporates repetition and form, Rigsby explored abstraction by working in series, at times inspired by found objects such as used books and scrap rubber.

slobodkina $20,000

Esphyr Slobodkina1908-2002

Note
Heckscher Museum of Art
Location
Huntington, NY

$20,000 for the conservation of thirty-six works by the painter, organized by conservator Jonathan Sherman and museum curator Anne Cohen DePietro. Born in Siberia, Slobodkina immigrated to New York in 1928 and became a founding member (later president) of the American Abstract Artists group. Using a personal technique of transferring preparatory drawings onto gesso-covered board, Slobodkina created paintings in a flat, abstract style that incorporates line and suspended or interlocking forms with pure, unmodulated color.

sugarman $10,000

George Sugarman1912-1999

Note
Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art - University of Texas at Austin
Location
Austin, TX

$10,000 to acquire the 1961 sculpture Two Reds and a Blue for the museum’s permanent collection, overseen by museum curator Annette Carlozzi. Sugarman lived and worked in New York and created large colorful sculptures, some of which exist as wall or floor pieces. Inspired by his early interest in the compositions of Chinese painting and Matisse, Sugarman produced rhythmical pieces made from jagged geometric forms that challenged the conventions of figure-based sculpture.

woodruff $10,000

Hale Woodruff1900-1980

Note
High Museum of Art
Location
Atlanta, GA

$10,000 toward Hale Woodruff in Atlanta, an exhibition on the painter with accompanying educational programs, organized by museum curator Carrie Przybilla in cooperation with the Atlanta Housing Authority. Raised in Nashville, TN, Woodruff traveled to Europe before returning to the U.S. to establish the fine arts department at Atlanta University. He joined the faculty at New York University in 1945. His paintings, some of which explore the social plight of African Americans living in the South during the Great Depression, evolved from impressionism to abstraction over the course of his career.

z_group_e $32,500

Group Exhibition

Note
National Academy of Design - Museum and School of Fine Arts
Location
New York, NY

$10,000 toward Surrealism U.S.A., a traveling group exhibition with accompanying catalogue and related lectures, organized by museum curator Isabelle Dervaux in consultation with art historian Garrit Lansing. This grant is awarded in support of the following artists: Gertrude Abercrombie (1908-1977), Otis Marion Dozier (1904-1987), Jared French (1905-1987), James Guy (1909-1983), Alexandre Hogue (1898-1984), Charles Howard (1899-1978), Reuben Kadish (1913-1992), Helen Lundeberg (1908-1999), George Marinko (1908-1989), and Charles Rain (1911-1985).

Group Exhibition

Note
Brigham Young University Museum of Art
Location
Provo, UT

$15,000 toward Thoroughly Modern: The “New Women Art Students” of Robert Henri, a group exhibition with accompanying catalogue and educational programs, organized by museum curator Marian Wardle. This grant is awarded in support of the following artists: Ruth Armer (1896-1977), Margaret Bruton (1894-1983), Elsie Driggs (1898-1992), Elizabeth Eyre De Lanux (1894-1996), Sarah McPherson (1894-1978), Elizabeth Olds (1896-1991), Margaret Rocle (1893-1981), and Margery Ryerson (1886-1989).

Group Exhibition

Note
Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History - University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Location
Chapel Hill, North Carolina

$7,500 toward the costs associated with hosting Celebration and Vision: The Hewitt Collection of African American Art, a traveling group exhibition, organized by the Bank of America Foundation. This grant is awarded in support of the following artists: Earl Hill (1927-1985), Alvin Hollingsworth (1931-2001), Ronald Joseph (1910-1992), Ellis Wilson (1899-1977), and Hale Woodruff (1900-1980).

Total: $252,500