Grants

Grant Recipients in 2009

Briggs $5,000

Ernest Briggs1923-1984

Note
Anita Shapolsky Art Foundation
Location
New York, NY

$5,000 to catalogue, restore, and photograph work by the painter in preparation for a monograph, organized by foundation director Anita Shapolsky. Born in San Diego, Briggs studied in San Francisco with artists Clyfford Still, David Park, and Ad Reinhardt, before moving to New York in 1953 to be an active participant in second generation Abstract Expressionism. His paintings, composed of fiery explosions of color and brushstroke, reveal lyrical aspects of space within the restrictions of a two dimensional surface.

Christensen $5,000

Dan Christensen1942-2007

Note
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art
Location
Kansas City, MO

$5,000 toward Dan Christensen: Forty Years of Painting, a traveling exhibition on the painter with accompanying catalogue and related public programs, organized by museum director Rachael Blackburn Cozad and curator Christopher Cook. Christensen was a modernist painter who reached critical acclaim in the 1960s with his “ribbon,” “plaid,” and “loop” paintings. Originally from Nebraska, Christensen studied at the Kansas City Art Institute before moving to New York City in the mid 1960s where he explored colorist painting with a variety of new tools and techniques that included paint-scraping and sprayguns.

cruz $7,000

Emilio Cruz1938-2004

Note
Estate of Emilio Cruz
Location
New York, NY

$7,000 to develop a website on the painter, organized by estate executor Patricia Cruz. Originally from the Bronx, Cruz participated in the Provincetown art scene during his early development as an artist. Influenced by Kline and DeKooning, he created figurative expressionistic work, defined through a painterly execution of intense colors and geometric lines, some of which reached proportions that were twice human scale.

douglas $10,000

Aaron Douglas1899-1979

Note
Delaware Art Museum
Location
Wilmington, DE

$10,000 toward the acquisition of a 1961 mural study by the painter for the museum’s permanent collection. 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.

glankoff $10,000

Sam Glankoff1894-1982

Note
Sam Glankoff Collection
Location
New York, NY

$10,000 toward the conservation of works on paper by the painter, organized by collection director Wendy Snyder and conservator Andrea Pitsch. Originator of an ink-transfer painting process known as “print-painting,” Glankoff worked reclusively in New York City for most of his life. His large scale pieces, structured through layers of brightly saturated colored panels of Japanese paper, create evocative, atmospheric surfaces delicately joined through glue and tape.

goldberg $5,000

Michael Goldberg1924-2007

Note
University Art Museum - California State University Long Beach
Location
Long Beach, CA

$5,000 toward the catalogue that will accompany the exhibition Resistance/Reactions: A Michael Goldberg Retrospective, organized by museum curator Alice Hutchison. A native New Yorker, Goldberg studied at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Art before enlisting in the U.S. Army, where he was wounded in battle. After returning to the New York School, Goldberg’s abstractions evolved from gestural imagery reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism to powerful architectural forms, dense with materiality that combine strongly delineated shapes with energtic brush marks.

gouverneur $7,000

Simon Gouverneur1934-1989

Note
Loyola University Museum of Art
Location
Chicago, IL

$7,000 to include work by the painter in the group exhibition Back to the Future with accompanying catalogue and related public programs, organized by museum director Pamela Ambrose and guest curator Carol Celentano. Born in New York City, Gouverneur painted and taught in several European and East Coast cities from the 1960s through the 1980s. His hard-edged abstract and patterned paintings, exploring communication and symbolic language, have been called the equivalent of a “visual Esperanto.”

lankton $10,000

Greer Lankton1958-1996

Note
Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art
Location
Pittsburgh, PA

$10,000 toward the re-creation of the sculptor’s 1996 installation Its all about ME Not You, which is a part of the museum’s permanent collection, organized by museum co-director Michael Olijnyk, assistant curator Owen Smith, and archivist Leah Durand. Originally from Flint, Michigan, Lankton studied at the Art Institute of Chicago before receiving her BFA from Pratt Institute Brooklyn, NY. She created highly expressive mannequin-like figures with full make-up, wigs and jewelry that, combined with auto biographical drawings and home-made shrines documenting New York’s 1980s East Village, explored gender, sexuality and the so-called “freaks” of society.

morton $17,000

Ree Morton1936-1977

Note
Drawing Center
Location
New York, NY

$7,000 toward Ree Morton: Drawings, an exhibition on the sculptor with accompanying catalogue and related public programs, organized by museum curator João Ribas. Ree Morton created her art in New York and California in a relatively short period from 1971 to 1977. She pioneered the development of installation art and sculpture which incorporate equivocal words and phrases, and an eclectic array of materials including brightly colored wire, wood, ribbons, as well as handcrafted plastics, and everyday found objects.

Ree Morton1936-1977

Note
Generali Foundation
Location
Vienna, Austria

$10,000 toward The Deities Must be Made to Laugh, Works 1971–1977, an exhibition on the sculptor with accompanying catalogue, organized by museum director Sabine Folie. Unorthodox in both form and material, much of Morton’s work falls between the disciplines of painting and sculpture. Creating her own private language of individual elements, Morton often used interchangeable materials intended to be displayed in varying arrangements. (Additional grant reviewed and funded in the summer of 2008 between grant review cycles).

pavia $7,000

Philip Pavia1911-2005

Note
Philip Pavia Trust
Location
New York, NY

$7,000 toward Philip Pavia: Works 1930-2005, a publication produced by John Isaacs Books, edited by trust director Natalie Edgar with an introduction by art historian Gerald Nordland. Primarily known as the founder of “The Club,” a group of artists in New York City that formed the melting pot of ideas related to Abstract Expressionism, Pavia was a sculptor in his own right and did not begin showing until after he retired from the group. Pavia created primarily abstract forms from carved marble that, arranged in a seemingly scattered and casual way, explored the “velocity” of stream of consciousness.

pierce $4,000

Florence Miller Pierce1918-2007

Note
Orange County Museum of Art
Location
Newport Beach, CA

$4,000 for costs associated with including works by the painter in Illumination: The Paintings of Georgia O’Keefe, Agnes Pelton, Agnes Martin, and Florence Miller Pierce, a traveling exhibition with accompanying catalogue, organized by museum deputy director Karen Moss. Living most of her life in New Mexico, Pierce traveled with her family to both New York and Los Angeles while developing a vocabulary of abstraction that conveyed transcendence and spiritualiy. She experimented with a variety of materials and processes including carved polyurethane foam, spray painted balsa wood panels, and layered resin pigment on mirrored Plexiglas that created ethereal surfaces which appear to emanate light.

slobodkina $5,000

Esphyr Slobodkina1908-2002

Note
Slobodkina Foundation
Location
Glen Head, NY

$5,000 for the shipping and crating costs associated with Rediscovering Slobodkina: Pioneer of American Abstraction, a traveling retrospective exhibition on the painter, organized by guest curator Sandra Kraskin, foundation director Ann Marie Mulhearn Sayer, and presented at the Heckscher Museum of Art. 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, un-modulated color.

sugarman $4,000

George Sugarman1912-1999

Note
Purdue University North Central
Location
Westville, IN

$4,000 toward the public programing costs associated with an exhibition on the sculptor, organized by the University’s Assisant Vice Chancellor Judy Jacobi. 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.

washington $4,000

James W. Washington, Jr.1909-2000

Note
James and Janie Washington Foundation
Location
Seattle, WA

$4,000 toward a permanent exhibition on the sculptor, organized by foundation director Timothy Detweiler. Washington was a self-taught artist who grew up in rural Mississippi before settling in Seattle during the early 1940s. Initially a painter and printmaker, it was not until he discovered stone in Mexico City that he became a sculptor, creating deeply symbolic, totem-like works of animals that express the spiritual connections of people and nature.

z_group_e $5,000

Group Exhibition

Note
Jersey City Museum
Location
Jersey City, NJ

$5,000 toward Industrial Strength: Precisionism and New Jersey, a group exhibition with accompanying catalogue and related public programs that will include painters Elsie Driggs (1898-1992,) Werner Drewes (1899-1985), and Reva Helfond (1910-2002), organized by museum curator Rocio Aranda-Alvarado. This exhibition will explore how these artists, working in the style of Precisionism, enhance our understanding of American culture and identity by examining the physical changes in regional urban and industrial landscapes of the early 20th century.

Total: $105,000