PROVINCETOWN – The Provincetown Art Association and Museum has announced the recipients of the 2018 Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Grant.
Selected were David Barnes of Middletown, RI; Ronald Hall of Brooklyn, NY; Shelley McCarl of Polson, MT; Lee Price of Beacon, NY; and Mie Yim of New York, NY.
In addition to a group exhibition at PAAM in 2019, PAAM awarded a total of $30,000. Recipients were recognized for their talent as well as their ability to benefit from the grant.
The Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Grant is awarded annually to under-recognized American painters over the age of 45 who demonstrate financial need. The mission of this grant is to promote public awareness of and a commitment to American art, and to encourage interest in artists who lack adequate recognition.
The grant process is now open for interested artists. The postmark deadline for applications is April 1, 2019.
The jurors for this year’s award were artist Dennis Kardon, curator Sarah Kianovsky, and artist Keith Mayerson.
About the Recipients:
David Barnes is a mid-career artist who lives in Middletown, RI and has his studio in
Bristol, RI. Primarily a painter, his work engages contemporary social and political issues through the lens of landscape painting. He holds a masters of fine arts degree in painting from UMASS Dartmouth and a bachelor of fine arts from the University of New Hampshire.
He has received numerous awards and grants for his work, including a RISCA fellowship and Pollock-Krasner Grant. His work is held by the RISD Museum, Salve Regina University, Newport Art Museum and numerous private collections. He currently teaches at Bristol Community College in Fall River, MA, Roger Williams University and the Newport Art Museum.
Ronald Hall’s paintings are a kaleidoscopic fusion of urban energy, figurative and narrative by nature. Growing up amidst the crime ridden neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, led him to see art as both an informative and educational teaching tool.
Born out of stories of fictional and non-fictional interpretations of African American tales and or fairy tales, his paintings attempt to challenge the viewer’s interpretation of what contemporary black art is. Ronald’s work has been exhibited in numerous galleries and art museums internationally and throughout the U.S.
A 2016 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture alumnus, Ronald also studied Illustration at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh.
Shelley McCarl was born in Michigan and grew up in Illinois and South Carolina. She earned a BFA in Studio Arts from the University of South Carolina. She and her family moved to Boise, Idaho, where they lived until 2016.
She had been included in and won awards for her pastel and oil paintings in such regional and national exhibitions as the Pastel Society of America’s annual Enduring Brilliance exhibitions, Maryland Federation of Art’s American Landscapes, and PaintAmerica’s Paint the Parks traveling exhibition.
She has also been selected as Artist in Residency at Craters of the Moon National Monument and at the Taft-Nicholson Center for the Humanities, overlooking the Red Rocks wildlife Refuge in southern Montana.
Her current body of work consists of a series of small, intimate landscapes, painted on-site while she and her husband explore the borders between the US and Canada. Her quiet paintings provide a glimpse of an unspectacular countryside, sometimes overlooked by travelers headed to more popular ‘vacation’ destinations.
McCarl considers the land between— unassuming, unpopulated spaces—as a constant source of inspiration. As the world’s population exponentially increases, causing ever-heavier demands for finite resources with corresponding, irrevocable climate changes, McCarl feels a sense of urgency in recording the essence of a fragile and shrinking natural world.
Lee Price was born in the small upstate New York town of Elmira. She studied painting at Philadelphia’s Moore College of Art and has a long held fascination with the intersection of the subjects of women and food. The images—bird’s-eye views of women surrounded by luscious looking desserts or the crumpled wrappers of a junk food binge—are all self-portraits, painted from photographs of the artist.
The life-size scenes are of Price indulging in “forbidden” foods: pints of ice cream, entire pies, a floor strewn with half eaten pastries. The scenes are often frenetic yet set in serene, private environments, typically bathrooms and bedrooms.
The scenes are beautiful, brightly colored, and outwardly joyful. The images are soft and beautiful, but they address disturbing subject matter. What at first glance looks like an afternoon tea party is, on closer inspection, revealed as a very lonely prison. The juxtaposition points the viewer toward the integration and inseparability of all aspects of experience, good and bad, lovely and harrowing, affliction and escape.
Mie Yim has had a number of solo and two person exhibitions including Lehmann Maupin, NY, Michael Steinberg, NY, Gallery in Arco, Turin, Italy. Numerous group exhibitions include the Drawing Center, Feature, Ise Cultural Foundation, Johnson County Community College, and the Weatherspoon Art Museum. She is a recipient of The New York Foundation of the Arts Painting Fellowship 2015. Yim was born in S. Korea, she’s based in New York.
The late Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed studied with Hans Hofmann in both New York and Provincetown. They were very active at PAAM as artist members and instructors in the summer school, and they served on a variety of committees throughout their 50 years on Cape Cod.
Orlowsky, in particular, was sensitive to the challenges artists face, especially those working against the mainstream or outside of popular schools of art. Her desire to provide financial support to mature artists through this generous endowment gift speaks to her passionate commitment to art for art’s sake and art created regardless of the demands and whims of the market place.
By TIM DUNN, CapeCod.com News Center
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