2024 Individual Visual Artist Fellowships Announced; Portland Artist Christine Clark Receives Joan Shipley Award (Photo) -01/31/24
Salem, Oregon – Leading a group of 10 Oregon visual artists awarded 2024 Individual Visual Artist Fellowships, Portland artist Christine Clark is the recipient of the Oregon Arts Commission’s honorary 2024 Joan Shipley Award. All 2024 Fellows will receive $5,000 awards.
The other Oregon artists awarded 2024 Fellowships are Amy Bay, Michael Boonstra, Christian Burchard, Anna Fidler, Bean Gilsdorf, Dana Lynn Louis, Andrew Myers, Stephanie Simek and Cara Tomlinson. We will feature them individually in the next few weeks!
The Joan Shipley Award is named for Oregon arts leader Joan Shipley, who passed away in 2011. Shipley was a collector, philanthropist and supporter of many arts and humanities organizations. In 2005, she and her husband John received an Oregon Governor’s Arts Award. Many in the arts community also counted her as a mentor and friend.
The Arts Commission’s Fellowship program is open to more than 20,000 artists from all disciplines who call Oregon home. Applicants to the program are reviewed by panels of Oregon arts professionals who consider artists of outstanding talent, demonstrated ability and commitment to the creation of new work(s). The Arts Commission reviews and acts on the panel’s recommendations for fellowship recipients. A total of 143 applications were received for 2024 Visual Arts Fellowships. Visual and performing artists are honored in alternating years.
The review panel for 2024 Fellowships was chaired by Arts Commissioner Jenny Green and included arts professionals Claire Burbridge, Ben Buswell (a 2018 Arts Commission Artist Fellow) and Erik Geschke (2012 and 2020 Fellow) and Matthew Letzelter, the director of the Watershed Center for Fine Art Publishing and Research.
Brief Fellowship recipients’ biographies follow. Artist work photos attached.
Amy Bay was born in Elkhart, Indiana, and is now a painter based in Portland. She holds a bachelor of fine arts from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago and a master’s in fine arts from Winchester School of Art. She also completed the London-based Turps Banana Correspondence Course for painters. Amy’s heavily worked paintings use motifs and imagery that draw from decorative sources. She values the subjective, the emotional and both the mysteries and traditions embedded in the painting process. Amy has exhibited her work at venues in the Pacific Northwest including Nationale, Ditch Projects, Melanie Flood Projects, Adams and Ollman, and SNAG Gallery, as well as throughout New York City at Peninsula Art Space, The Painting Center, The Drawing Center, Printed Matter, Brooklyn Public Library and The Bronx Museum of the Arts. She has shown internationally in group and solo shows and has been awarded grants and projects from The Rauschenberg Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Stelo, the Regional Art and Culture Council, The Lower East Side Printshop, Dieu Donné Papermill and Women's Studio Workshop. Amy is represented by Nationale.
Michael Boonstra is a visual artist based in Eugene. His creative practice shifts between drawing, photography, installation and sculpture. He is a founding member of Gray Space Project, a group of Oregon artists based in the Corvallis, Eugene and Roseburg areas who came together in 2016 to develop site-based projects that foster connections between artists, places, histories and communities. Michael’s recent commissions include site-specific projects at the Oregon State University Marine Studies Building, the Oregon State Treasury Resiliency Building and the Lane County Farmers Market Pavilion. His work is included in the collections of the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, The High Desert Museum, the City of Portland, Oregon State University Cascades, Umpqua Community College and PacificSource. Michael has been an artist in residence at Playa, Djerassi, Caldera, Pine Meadow Ranch and the Kesey Farm. He received his bachelor of fine arts from the University of Michigan and his master’s in fine arts from the University of Oregon.
Born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1955, Christian Burchard has been living in the United States since 1978. Starting out as a furniture maker’s apprentice in Germany in the middle ‘70s, he then studied sculpture and drawing at the Museum School in Boston and at the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver, British Columbia. In 1982 he opened Cold Mountain Studio in Southern Oregon and has since then exhibited widely throughout the US. His pieces are part of many public and private collections in the US and abroad. Christian’s preferred material is Pacific Madrone, which he works while it is still green and unseasoned. His current work includes wall sculptures, musical instruments and freestanding sculptural objects. Christian lives in Ashland.
Christine Clark is an artist living and working in Portland. Her work focuses on public art, installation art and abstract sculpture in steel, steel wire and mixed materials. She is a former professor and head of the Metals Department at Oregon College of Art and Craft, where she taught jewelry/metalsmithing, sculpture and installation art. She has been awarded residencies with the John Michael Kohler Arts Center’s Arts/Industry and the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming. Christine is a member of Nine Gallery, an alternative art gallery that exhibits experimental and installation-based work. She is also co-owner of Ninety Twenty Studios, a maker/education space in Portland and administrator of Ninety Twenty Workshop, offering both in-person and online classes.
Anna Fidler was born in Traverse City, Michigan, in 1973 and now lives in Corvallis, where she teaches art at Oregon State University. She earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in painting from Western Michigan University and a master’s in fine arts in studio art from Portland State University. Annar has had solo exhibitions at The Boise Art Museum and the Portland Art Museum, and has been widely exhibited at such venues as The Everhart Museum of Natural History, Science and Art, The University of Southern California, The Tacoma Art Museum, The Schneider Museum of Art and The Sun Valley Museum of Art. Her exhibitions have been reviewed in publications such as Art in America, The Washington Post, The Oregonian and The San Francisco Chronicle. Grants and awards include a Regional Arts and Culture Council Project Grant and residencies at The Iris Project + Yucca Valley Material Lab and The Sun Valley Museum of Art. Her work is held in the collections of the Portland Art Museum, the Boise Art Museum, The Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Portland Portable Works Collection and Seattle Portable Works Collection. Anna is represented by Johansson Projects in Oakland.
As a fourth-generation seamstress, Bean Gilsdorf uses textiles to create collages, sculptures and photographs that serve as malleable engagements with historic events and cultural constructs. Her explorations of the relationship between image, object and narrative have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and the American Textile History Museum, as well as exhibition spaces in England, Italy, China, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and South Africa. Bean’s work is in the permanent collections of the Portland Art Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, Kala Art Institute and the International Quilt Museum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Ford Family Foundation Fellowship Residency at Ucross (2023), an Andy Warhol Foundation Grant (2020), two creative Fulbright Fellowships to Poland (2015–2016 and 2016–2017), a Graduate Fellowship at Headlands Center for the Arts (2011–2012), and a Graduate Full Merit Scholarship to the MFA Fine Arts program at California College of the Arts (2009). Gilsdorf holds a bachelor of arts degree from Simon’s Rock at Bard College and a masters in fine arts from California College of the Arts.
Dana Lynn Louis is an artist and activist whose practice encompasses sculptural work, large-scale installations, public art projects and collaborations that explore interconnectedness and catalyze social justice. She works in media ranging from drawing, painting, glass, fiber and ceramics to photography, sound and light projections. Dana has exhibited her work at the Hoffman Gallery at Lewis & Clark College, Portland Art Museum and San Juan Islands Museum of Art, among other venues. In 2017, she founded the arts nonprofit Gather:Make:Shelter to address houselessness by providing arts mentorship and to help establish alternative shelter villages. Her work has been supported by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The Ford Family Foundation, Oregon Arts Commission, Regional Arts and Culture Council, PICA: Precipice grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation, Northwest Artist Awards and, in 2023, the Bonnie Bronson Visual Arts Fellowship. Dana has participated in numerous extensive residencies, including Thread in Senegal West Africa, a project of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation; Franz Meyer, Munich; Oregon State Hospital; Tacoma Glass Museum; and Bullseye Glass. She earned her bachelor’s in Studio Art and Education from the University of Wisconsin: Madison and a master’s in fine arts from Ohio State University. Dana is represented by FriesenSolo in Sun Valley, Idaho and by Russo Lee Gallery in Portland.
Andrew Myers is an Albany-based visual artist and educator who explores the concepts of instinct, extinction, isolation and the conservation and preservation of wild places and creatures in work that is drawing-based with elements of installation, printmaking, sculpture and animation. He received his undergraduate art degree from Eastern Oregon University and a master’s in fine arts from Portland State University. Andrew is a two-time recipient of the Career Opportunity Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission and The Ford Family Foundation. Notable exhibitions have been presented by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Soil Gallery in Seattle, Rodgers Gallery at Willamette University, Fairbanks Gallery at Oregon State University, RISD ISB Gallery in Providence, Rhode Island and the PM Bohúň Gallery in Liptov, Slovakia. He has been awarded funded artist residencies at Playa at Summer Lake, Oak Spring Garden Foundation and Pine Meadow Ranch Center for Arts and Agriculture as well as an OAC Golden Spot Award at Caldera Arts. He currently teaches at Oregon State University.
Using an array of materials, Stephanie Simek makes works in two dimensions, three dimensions, sound and performance. She has lived in the Pacific Northwest since 2007, when she began performing with instruments she built from deconstructed obsolete devices. Continuing on the path of researching the inner workings of materials and systems with unique and exceptional properties, she was an artist in residence at Portland’s Museum of Contemporary Craft. This engagement was titled “Jewels/Joules,” and led to a research residency at Signal Culture, where she studied the magnetic recording potential of minerals. Looking further into visualizing what is happening under the surface, Stephanie then worked as a physicist’s apprentice making ultrasonic sensors which allowed her to incorporate specialized skills into her practice and further develop her perspective on material relationships. Recently her short play, “tied to the moon, tide to the moon,” served as the framework for a solo exhibition of the same name at Veronica Project Space in Seattle, consisting of sculptures, an artist book and performance. While developing a new body of work this past year, she has been an artist in residence at Mass MoCA, Tobichi Art Museum (Japan), and A.R.E. (Netherlands).
Cara Tomlinson’s abstract paintings, drawings and sculptures focus on ecologies and relationships between human and non-human bodies. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and has been supported by numerous grants and residency awards including: Monson Arts, the Ucross Foundation, Millay Colony for the Arts, the Willapa Bay Artist Residency and a Mellon Foundation Engage Grant. Additionally, her collaborative work with Bins lab, a collective of artists that examined waste streams through sculpture, video and performance, was featured in Soil Gallery (Seattle), Salem Art Association and the Portland Building. She holds a bachelor of arts degree from Bennington College in Painting and Literature and a master’s in fine arts in Painting from the University of Oregon. Cara currently teaches painting and experimental art practices, with an emphasis on art as an ecological practice, at Lewis & Clark College.
###
The Oregon Arts Commission provides leadership, funding and arts programs through its grants, special initiatives and services. Nine commissioners, appointed by the Governor, determine arts needs and establish policies for public support of the arts. The Arts Commission became part of Business Oregon (formerly Oregon Economic and Community Development Department) in 1993, in recognition of the expanding role the arts play in the broader social, economic and educational arenas of Oregon communities. In 2003, the Oregon legislature moved the operations of the Oregon Cultural Trust to the Arts Commission, streamlining operations and making use of the Commission’s expertise in grantmaking, arts and cultural information and community cultural development.
The Arts Commission is supported with general funds appropriated by the Oregon legislature and with federal funds from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as funds from the Oregon Cultural Trust. More information about the Oregon Arts Commission is available online at artscommission.oregon.gov.
