The Walters Art Museum To Host The Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize For 2013

BALTIMORE, MD (June 28, 2013)—The Walters Art Museum and the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts (BOPA) present the Sondheim Artscape Prize: 2013 Finalists. On view at the Walters June 29–August 11, 2013, the exhibition showcases artwork by the finalists for the annual Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize, a $25,000 fellowship that is given each year to a visual artist or visual artist collaborators living and working in the Greater Baltimore region. M&T Bank has partnered with BOPA to establish the M&T Bank Sondheim Finalists’ Awards, which provide a $2,500 honorarium for each of the remaining finalists not selected for the fellowship.

Gabriela Bulisova (Alexandria, VA); Larry Cook (Landover Hills, MD); Caitlin Cunningham (Baltimore, MD); Nate Larson (Baltimore, MD); Louie Palu (Washington, D.C.); and Dan Steinhilber (Washington, D.C.) are the six finalists. The artists were selected by an independent panel of jurors, who later review the exhibition and interview each artist to decide the winner of this prestigious award. The prize winner is announced during a special ceremony at the Walters Art Museum on Saturday, July 13 at 7 p.m. Jurors are Caroline Busta, a New York based art critic and associate editor at Artforum magazine; Jenny Schlenzka, associate curator at New York’s MoMA PS1; and Beverly Semmes, an internationally recognized mixed media artist. In its eighth year, the Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize is held in conjunction with the annual Artscape juried exhibition and is produced by the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts. The finalists and semifinalists exhibitions are presented in partnership with The Walters Art Museum and Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). An exhibition of the semifinalists’ work will be shown in MICA’s Decker and Meyerhoff galleries at 1303 West Mount Royal Avenue during Artscape weekend, Friday, July 19 through Sunday, July 21 and continues until Sunday, August 4. Artscape, America’s largest free arts festival, features more than 150 fine artists, fashion designers, and craftspeople; visual art exhibitions, outdoor sculpture, art cars, and photography; live concerts on outdoor stages; a full schedule of performing arts including dance, opera, theater, film, and experimental music; family events such as hands-on projects, children’s entertainers, and street theater; and an international menu of food and beverages.

The 2013 Sondheim Artscape Prize is made possible through the generous support of the Abell Foundation, Alex. Brown & Sons Charitable Foundation, Charlesmead Foundation, Ellen Sondheim Dankert, France-Merrick Foundation, Hecht-Levi Foundation, Legg Mason, M&T Bank Foundation, Henry & Ruth Blaustein Rosenberg Foundation, John Sondheim and Whiting-Turner Contracting.

The exhibition and opening event at the Walters Art Museum have been generously supported by Cynthia Alderdice, the Talkin Fund of the Columbia Foundation, Time Group Investments, Rachel and Joseph Rabinowitz, The Zamoiski, Barber, Segal Family Foundation, and the Greif Family Fund.

JANET & WALTER SONDHEIM ARTSCAPE PRIZE FINALISTS

Gabriela Bulisova (Alexandria, VA)
Gabriela Bulisova is a documentary photographer and multimedia artist based in the Washington, D.C. area.  Her work focuses on underreported and overlooked stories affecting marginalized populations around the world and in the United States. She has received numerous awards for her work including the National Press Photographers Association’s Short Grant, Open Society Institute’s Moving Walls 18, the Corcoran College of Art + Design Faculty Award, and a Puffin Foundation Grant. Her work has been exhibited extensively in the Washington, D.C. area where she is a member of the Metro Collective Photo Agency. She is a 2005 graduate of the Master of Fine Arts program in photography and digital imaging at the Maryland Institute College of Art and teaches photojournalism at the Corcoran College of Art + Design.

Larry Cook (Landover Hills, MD)
Larry Cook, a 2012 Master of Fine Arts graduate from The George Washington University (GWU), is a photographer and video artist who has been featured in exhibitions in several galleries in the Washington, D.C. and Maryland areas. His work has also been featured at The Corcoran Gallery of Art, the University of Maryland, the Brentwood Arts Exchange, Hillyer Art Space, the Smithsonian, and Gallery 102 at GWU. He is an adjunct professor of photography at GWU and a proud teacher for Project Create, a non-profit organization that provides art education for children experiencing poverty and homelessness.

Caitlin Cunningham (Baltimore, MD)
Caitlin Cunningham’s sculptural installations were recently the focus of a solo exhibition entitled Tan Penis Island at sophiajacob, a gallery in Baltimore, MD. Her work has also been featured in exhibitions locally as well as nationally, including Nudashank, Baltimore, MD; 48 Bowery, New York, NY; Space 1026, Philadelphia, PA; Fountain Art Fair, New York, NY; Civilian Art Projects, Washington, D.C., among others. Cunningham’s art is included in the collections of The Baltimore Museum of Art in Baltimore, MD and the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, OR. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2005, where she majored in sculpture and painting.

Nate Larson (Baltimore, MD)
Nate Larson is a member of the full-time faculty at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and serves on the board of the Society of Photographic Education. His work with photographic media, artist books, and narrative video has been widely exhibited across the U.S. and internationally. Numerous publications have reviewed and published his projects, including WIRED, NPR’s The Picture Show, The New York Times, Frieze, Utne Reader, The Washington Post, and ART PAPERS. His work is included in the collections of the Portland Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Cleveland Institute of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. Larson earned a Master in Fine Arts from the Ohio State University in 2002, and a Bachelor of Arts from Purdue University in 2000. Larson recently completed an artists’ residency at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in 2013.

Louie Palu (Washington, D.C.)
Louie Palu is an award-winning documentary photographer whose work has appeared in publications and exhibitions internationally. He has been awarded numerous honors including an Alexia Grant, Aftermath Project Grant, Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting grant, and is a Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow with the New America Foundation. Louie’s work has been featured in The New York Times, TIME, The Atlantic, and the BBC. His work is in the permanent collections of many museums and archives including The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, George Eastman House, Portland Art Museum, National Gallery of Canada, and has been exhibited world-wide. Palu is best known for his long-term studies of social and political issues, which includes a five-year project on Kandahar, Afghanistan, a project on the prison in Guantanamo Bay, and a recent body of work covering the drug war in Mexico.

Dan Steinhilber (Washington, D.C.)
Dan Steinhilber, a 2002 Master of Fine Arts graduate of American University, lives and works in Washington DC. His sculptural installation-based artwork has been featured in dozens of exhibitions throughout the United States. These include solo exhibitions at the Kreeger Museum, Washington, D.C.; Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, NY; the Baltimore Museum of Art, in Baltimore, MD; the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX; the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. He is also part of group exhibitions at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA; Gallery Four, Baltimore, MD; D.U.M.B.O. Arts Center, Brooklyn, NY; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE; the Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA, to name just a few. His artwork has also been highlighted in numerous publications such as The Washington Post, Baltimore City Paper, Sculpture magazine, ARTnews, and The New York Times Style Magazine. Steinhilber has been awarded a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant and a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship.

About the Walters Museum

The Walters Art Museum is located in downtown Baltimore’s historic Mount Vernon Cultural District at North Charles and Centre Streets. At the time of his death in 1931, museum founder Henry Walters left his entire collection of art–including a legendary collection of illuminated medieval manuscripts that is a national treasure – to the city of Baltimore. Between 1895 and 1931, Walters collected around 730 codices.  Its permanent collection includes ancient art, medieval art and manuscripts, decorative objects, Asian art, and Old Master and 19th-century paintings.

Hours/Admission

Sondheim Artscape Prize: 2013 Finalists is free. Museum hours are 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday and Thursday evenings from 5–9 p.m. General admission to the Walters’ permanent collection is free. For more information, go to www.thewalters.org.

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