Grants

Grant Recipients in 2007

agostini $5,000

Peter Agostini1913-1993

Note
Estate of Peter Agostini
Location
New York, NY

$5,000 toward the conservation of the abstract plaster work by the sculptor, organized by Diana Agostini. With only a year of training at the Leonardo Da Vinci School in Manhattan, Agostini was virtually self-taught and explored the continuum between figuration and abstraction. He created volumous plaster casts of inflated inner tubes as well as abstracted interpretations from such everyday objects as newspapers, balloons and pillows.

burton $20,000

Scott Burton1939-1989

Note
McNay Art Museum
Location
San Antonio, TX

$20,000 toward the acquisition of the 1985-86 outdoor sculpture Three-Quarter Cube Bench, for the museum’s permanent collection, overseen by museum curator Rene Paul Barilleaux. Orginally an art critic, Burton began his exploration of functional sculpture by arranging and combining furniture found on the street. His later and best known work was influenced by Russian Constructivism, De Stijl and the Bauhaus, and used materials such as stone, steel and acrylic to explore the intersection of design, furniture, architecture and sculpture.

castle $5,000

James Castle1899-1977

Note
Foundation for Self-Taught Artists
Location
Philadelphia, PA

$5,000 for the post production and distribution costs associated with a documentary film about the artist, organized by foundation director Molly Dougherty, estate manager Jacqueline Crist and edited by director Jeffrey Wolf. Castle was a self-taught artist who was born deaf and lived his entire life with family in Idaho. Rejecting common art materials in favor of sharpened sticks, soot, saliva, and found paper, Castle created drawings and sculptural objects that served not only as a representation of his world but as a means to communicate his inner experience and perception.

darcangelo $10,000

Allan D’Arcangelo1930-1998

Note
University at Buffalo - Anderson Gallery
Location
Buffalo, NY

$10,000 toward the archival research associated with the exhibition Allan D’Arcangelo: Retrospective and accompanying catalogue, organized by gallery curator Sandra Firmin in partnership with the Burchfield-Penney Art Center. As a painter, activist, and educator, D’Arcangelo communicated socially-minded ideas in his artwork, antiwar protests, and classrooms at the School of Visual Arts and Brooklyn College. He created bold compositions and emblematic depictions of consumer products, highway landscapes, industrial structures and airplanes to explore the uncertainties of a changing society.

davis $10,000

Ulysses Davis1913-1990

Note
High Museum of Art
Location
Atlanta, GA

$10,000 toward The Treasures of Ulysses Davis, an exhibition on the sculptor with accompanying catalogue, organized by museum curator Susan Crawley and director Michael Shapiro. Born in Fizgerald, Georgia, Davis learned metalworking from his father, a blacksmith, and began carving wood when he was eleven. After working for the railroad, he became a Savannah barber and carved stately and whimsical wood figures, furniture pieces, and reliefs out of shipyard lumber, blocks donated by his friends, and wood he bought at lumbaryards, sometimes implementing barber tools to add textural details.

douglas $7,000

Aaron Douglas1899-1979

Note
Spencer Museum of Art - University of Kansas
Location
Lawrence, KS

$7,000 toward a documentary video about the artist’s murals that will accompany an exhibition on the painter with accompanying catalogue, organized by museum curator Susan Earle. A native of Topeka, Kansas, Douglas was a socially conscious artist who contributed to the visual legacy of the Harlem Renaissance through his paintings, murals, prints and illustrations for progressive journals and books. He played a pivotal role in the shifting attitudes of African-American artists in New York who explored and celebrated their African heritage in their artwork.

hadzi $5,000

Dimitri Hadzi1921-2006

Note
MIT List Visual Arts Center
Location
Cambridge, MA

$5,000 toward the conservation of the 1963 bronze sculpture Elmo MIT, organized by assistant director David Freilach and Cliff Craine of Daedalus Conservation. A native New Yorker, Hadzi left the modern art practices of New York to study sculpture and its relationship to architecture in the epicenter of western arts classical past, Rome. The title Elmo reflects Hadzi fascination with Greek antiquity both in its translation (Elmo means “helmit”) and its simultaneously abstract and figurative shape.

hansen $15,000

Al Hansen1927-1995

Note
Al Hansen Estate
Location
New York, NY

$15,000 to conserve and archivally store the artist’s work and ephemora, organized by estate directors Bibbe Hansen and Sean Carrillo. A founding member of New York’s Fluxus movement, Hansen moved to Cologne Germany during the 1980s and established an art school called the Ultimate Akademie. In addition to organizing some of the first Happenings and participating in early Pop art, Hansen created numourous intricate collages based on the figure of Venus out of such everyday objects as matchsticks, aluminum foil and Hershey’s candy wrappers.

jimenez $25,000

Luis Jiménez1940-2006

Note
Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum
Location
Chicago, IL

$25,000 toward the acquisition of the 1989 sculpture Border Crossing for the museum’s permanent collection, overseen by collections director Rebecca Meyers. A Chicano artist from El Paso, Texas, Jiménez trained as a craftsman with his father making neon signs before becoming a sculptor who worked in fiberglass. His medium and technique represent the fusion of the industrial “car culture” in which he grew up, with an allegorical representation of the immigration story of which Jiménez was a part.

lewandowski $10,000

Edmund Lewandowski1915-1998

Note
Flint Institute of Arts
Location
Flint, MI

$10,000 toward an exhibition on the painter with accompanying catalogue, organized by guest curator Valerie Leeds. Lewandowski was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and attended the Layton School of Art where he ultimately became director. After pursuing his career as a muralist in New York under the Federal Arts Project, he became a precisionist painter who, through the use of simple line, pure color and bold shapes, abstracted scenes and objects of the industrial and mechanical world.

mccarthy $10,000

Justin McCarthy1891-1977

Note
GoggleWorks Center for the Arts
Location
Reading, PA

$10,000 toward a retrospective exhibition with accompanying catalogue, organized by center director Diane LaBelle and guest scholar Norman Giradot. McCarthy spent his youth in Paris where he immersed himself in the art at the Louvre, before returning to the states to attend Law School at the University of Pennsylvania. His dropping out of school and subsequent nervous breakdown initiated McCarthy’s painting full-time. Inspired by the media and the world around him McCarthy created increasingly abstract impressionistic work he initially presented at art fairs.

mikolowski $5,000

Ann Mikolowski1940-1999

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

$5,000 toward Ann Mikolowski: Two Ways of Looking in a Mirror, an exhibition on the painter with accompanying catalogue organized by center director Michelle Perron. Mikolowski devoted much of her art to two completely different but wholly connected bodies of work: the large-scale land and waterscapes and miniature portraits. Tiny in their dimensions (the largest measuring only 3 by 4 inches) and with the immediacy of Polaroid snapshots, the portraits of artists, musicians and poets read like full-size works while her large land and waterscape paintings exhibit her power of observation and sensitivity to nuance.

morath $7,500

Inge Morath1923-2002

Note
Inge Morath Foundation
Location
New York, NY

$7,500 to scan and catalogue the photojournalist’s color archive, organized by foundation director John P. Jacobs. Born in Graz, Austria, Morath worked as a photographer throughout Europe, before settling in New York and Connecticut. A leading photojouranalist and the second woman to become a full member of Magnum Photos, Morath was a mentor to innumerable young women photographers and pursued many independent projects that often included the revisting of people and places she had photographed on her earlier assignments.

ramberg $15,000

Christina Ramberg1946-1995

Note
DePaul University Museum
Location
Chicago, IL

$15,000 toward the acquisition of up to four works by the painter for the museum’s permanent collection. Ramberg was born in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she later became Chair of the Department of Painting and Drawing, and was associated with a group of artists who became known as the Chicago Imagists. Her paintings of small-scale, tightly-cropped figures in constrictive clothing, emphasis the role advertising plays in shaping the female form and intergrates a feminist perspective while celebrating a pop sensibility.

rivers $5,000

Haywood Bill Rivers1922-2001

Note
Fractured Atlas
Location
New York, NY

$5,000 toward the conservation of the painter’s work, organized by Maya M. Rivers with conservation by Rustin Levenson Art Conservation Associates. Rivers left his native North Carolina in the late 1930s and, after several years in Baltimore, arrived in New York to study at the Art Students League. The spirituality that is reflected in his geometric abstract paintings of pattern and form is influenced by American folk art and the patchwork quilts he designed as a child with his mother and grandmother.

seator $10,000

Glen Seator1956-2002

Note
12 Duffield: The Glen Seator Foundation
Location
New York, NY

$10,000 toward Glen Seator: Making Things Moving Places, a catalogue raisonne on the sculptor, edited by foundation director Nina Holland and published by Steidl Publishers, Germany. Seator’s mature work developed from his experiments in casting techniques carried out during his formal training at SUNY Purchase as well as his experiences with building and construction projects. A multitude of interests led him to the exploration of subjects related to humanity and built space through the creation of cast objects, full-scale architectural reconstructions, and photographs.

seidner $5,000

David Seidner1957-1999

Note
International Center of Photography
Location
New York, NY

$5,000 to catalogue and conserve work by the photographer, organized by center curator Edward Earle. Originally from Los Angeles, Seidner spent much of his career in Paris as a fashion and fine art photographer and frequently contributed to magazines that include Italian Vogue, Harper’s and Queens, and Bomb. His fine artwork is primarily portraits of contemporay artists as well as those based on historical paintings, while his more abstract work explores the interplay of volume and shape inspired by the chance-based procedures of John Cage.

shields $6,000

Alan Shields1944-2005

Note
Dieu Donné Papermill
Location
New York, NY

$6,000 for an exhibition with accompanying catalogue on artist Alan Shields, organized by director Dona Warner. Blurring the lines between painting, printmaking, sculpture, and installation, Shields produced complicated process-oriented work with a bold approach to color, line and composotion. By abandoning the conventions of the stretched canvas, he increasingly worked with handmade paper as a sculptural medium that he presented in numerous New York galleries.

taylor $15,000

Al Taylor1948-1999

Note
Honolulu Academy of Arts
Location
Honolulu, Hi

$15,000 toward an exhibition on the sculptor with accompanying catalogue, organized by academy curator Michael Rooks. Taylor was a New York-based artist who exhibited predominately in Europe. His imaginative and playful style is exemplified in work that explores multiple angles and viewpoints. Taylor saw his sculptures as three-dimensional drawings and used industrial materials such as inner tubes, plexi-glass and foamed plastic floats in his work.

wolcott $5,000

Marion Post Wolcott1910-1990

Note
Scripps College - Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery
Location
Claremont, CA

$5,000 toward the acquisition of one to two pieces from the photographer’s 1930s/1940s work for the museum’s permanent collection, selected by gallery director Mary Davis MacNaughton. Originally from the east coast, Wolcott was in Germany during the rise of Nazism where she studied child psychology and began taking photographs. Wolcott took documentary photographs of the labor issues in the South, the Farm Security Administration, and later, the people and culture of Iran and Pakistan.

z_group_p $10,000

Group Publication

Location
New York, NY

$10,000 toward Club Without Walls, a publication on the notes of Philip Pavia, edited by artist and scholar Natalie Edgar and published by MidMarch Press. The book will include information on a wide range of artists who were members of the Artists’ Club in New York City, many of whom are lesser-known and recently deceased such as:

Total: $205,500