Grants

Grant Recipients in 2008

biederman $10,000

Charles Biederman1906-2004

Note
Charles Biederman Trust
Location
Inver Grove Heights, MN

$10,000 for the photography associated with a monograph on the painter, written by art historian/curator Susan C. Larsen. Originally from Cleveland, Biederman traveled abroad as a young man and exhibited his early painting in Chicago, New York and Paris, before settling in Red Wing, MN. It was in the mid 1930s that Biederman began to produce brightly colored abstract reliefs made of wood, metal and plexiglas that explored pure geometric abstraction through three dimensional planes.

castle $10,000

James Castle1899-1977

Note
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Location
Philadelphia, PA

$10,000 toward James Castle: A Retrospective, an exhibition on the painter with accompanying catalogue and related public programs, organized by museum curator Ann Percy. 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.

cha $6,000

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha1951-1982

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

$6,000 for the essay written by museum curator Constance Lewallen for the publication Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Selected Writings. To escape military rule and repressive conditions in her native Korea, Cha and her family relocated many times before settling in San Francisco in the 1960s. Cha was multilingual and used language as a means of exploring issues of displacement and cultural identity and incorporated materials such as glass, burlap, ash and earth in her works on paper and in performance pieces.

fine $10,000

Perle Fine1905-1988

Note
Hofstra University Museum
Location
Hempstead, NY

$10,000 toward Tranquil Power: The Art of Perle Fine, a traveling retrospective exhibition on the painter with accompanying catalogue and symposium, guest-curated by Susan Knowles. At a young age, Fine moved from her native Boston to New York City to study at the Art Students League and with Hans Hofmann, before ultimately moving to Long Island in the mid 1950s where she built her studio. Fine was interested in the metaphysics of pure abstraction and created work that explored the balance and tension between vibrant forms existing in a grid-structured space.

low $5,000

Jackson Mac Low1922-2004

Note
Estate of Jackson Mac Low
Location
New York, NY

$5,000 for the photography and supplies needed to document and archivally store the painter’s work, organized by estate executor Anne Tardos and assistant Thomas Hummel. Born in Chicago, Low began his artistic career as a composer before moving to New York in the early 1940s where he produced avant garde work alongside friends and associates such as John Cage, Robert Raushenberg, and La Monte Young. A founding member of the Fluxus movement, Low created an extradordinary body of textual and visual art that expanded the bounderies of poetry, music, painting and sculpture.

lozano $20,000

Lee Lozano1930-1999

Note
Wexner Center for the Arts - The Ohio State University
Location
Columbus, OH

$20,000 for the costs associated with including the painter’s work in Solitaire: Lee Lozano, Sylvia Plimack, Joan Semmel, an exhibition with accompanying catalogue and related public programs, guest-curated by Helen Molesworth. After studying art in Chicago, Lozano successfully participated in the New York art world during the 1960s before permanently leaving by the early 1970s. In addition to exploring sexually charged figurative work, Lozano created monochromatic paintings that investigated scientific phenomena as well as conceptual language-based drawings that served as instructions for performance pieces.

meo $7,000

Salvatore S. Meo1914-2004

Note
University of the Arts - Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery
Location
Philadelphia, PA

$7,000 toward an exhibition and catalogue on the collage/assemblage artist, organized by gallery director Sid Sachs. A native Philadelphian of Italian origin, Meo studied at the Tyler School of Art of Temple University and in 1949 received a Tiffany Foundation grant that allowed him to study in Italy. Rome ultimately became his second home, where he created mixed media constructions influenced by abstract painting that explored themes of abandonment, decay, and destruction through the use of found material.

overby $7,500

Robert Overby1935-1993

Note
Armand Hammer Museum of Art
Location
Los Angeles, CA

$7,500 toward the acquisition of the drawing Final Color Rubbing (1972) by the sculptor for the museum’s permanent collection, overseen by museum curator Gary Garrels. Trained as a graphic designer and based primarily in California, Overby began his career as an abstract painter. His later work evolved into monumental wall hangings and sculptures made from latex casts of architectural structures such as doors, cabinets and walls.

page $20,000

Homer Page1918-1985

Note
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Location
Kansas City, MO

$20,000 toward Homer Page: The Guggenheim Year, an exhibition on the photographer with accompanying monograph, organized by museum curator Keith F. Davis. Originally from Oakland, CA, Page studied art and social psychology at the University of California and in 1940 took classes at the New Bauhaus in Chicago. In 1949, approximately a year after moving to New York, Page received a Guggenheim Fellowship that allowed him to focus on his artistic vision of modern American culture through formally inventive photographs that were charged with a complex sense of psychology and emotion.

rosskam $5,000

Louise Rosskam1910-2003

Location
Washington, DC

$5,000 for the travel and research associated with completing a monograph on the photographer, written by independent scholars Laura Katzmann and Beverly Brannan. From the 1930s to the 1960s, Rosskam was a pioneer of documentary photography and worked for the Farm Security Administration, Standard Oil, the Puerto Rico Office of Information as well as various journals that include Life, Colliers, and American Magazine. Her photographs, elegantly composed and socially engaging, illuminate the everyday struggles of individuals and communities across the United States and Puerto Rico.

shields $5,000

Alan Shields1944-2005

Note
Estate of Alan Shields
Location
Shelter Island, NY

$5,000 to archivally preserve work by the artist, organized by estate family members Victoria Shields Weslek and Jason Shields. Blurring the lines between painting, printmaking, sculpture, and installation, Shields produced complicated process-oriented work with a bold approach to color, line and composition. By abandoning the conventions of the stretched canvas, he increasingly worked with handmade paper as a sculptural medium that he presented in New York galleries.

truitt $20,000

Anne Truitt1921-2004

Note
Smithsonian Institution - Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Location
Washington, DC

$20,000 toward an exhibition on the sculptor with accompanying monograph and related public programs, organized by museum curator Kristen Hileman. Orignally from Baltimore, Truitt spent the majority of her life in and around Washington, DC, creating geometric abstract sculptures that played a significant part in the Minimalist movement. Her carefully built wood structures, pain-stakenly layered with multiple coats of luminous paint, brought to attention the relationship between planes of structure and planes of color by celebrating what she described as “color in three dimensions, color set free…”

weston $10,000

Brett Weston1911-1993

Note
Phillips Collection
Location
Washington, DC

$10,000 toward Brett Weston: Out of the Shadow, a traveling retrospective exhibition on the photographer with accompanying catalogue and educational programs, organized by museum curator Stephen Bennett Phillips. Weston was born in Los Angeles, and learned photography first as an assistant to and then partner with his father, Edward Weston. A recipient of a Guggenhein grant in 1947, Weston photographed landscapes along the East Coast as well as forms and textures that interested him in Europe, creating photographic images that embraced pure abstraction.

z_group_e $10,000

Group Exhibition

Note
Spertus Museum
Location
Chicago, IL

$10,000 toward African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund collection, a group exhibition with accompanying catalogue, organized by museum curator Staci Boris and guest curator Daniel Schulman. The exhibition, bringing together well over 50 works, will demonstrate the broad geographic and thematic range of African American art following the Harlem Renaissance. This grant is awarded in support of the work of the following artists:

Total: $145,500