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Pews announced; visual art takes a beating
October 9, 2010 · 4 Comments
We are sorry to be the bringers of bad tidings. The Pew Fellowships in the Arts were announced this week, and boy oh boy, this was not good news for people in Philadelphia in the cutting edge visual arts scene. Rather, the new selection process rewarded people working in other disciplines like architecture and jazz or in traditional art areas like clay and jewelry –all are disciplines that have a strong financial model and that need this support less than non-traditional visual art.
From left to right: Germaine Ingram, photo by James Wasserman; still from Kara Crombie's Aloof Hills, courtesy of the artist; James Sugg, courtesy of Pig Iron Theatre Company.
Here’s who won:
Max Apple (fiction writer)
Melanie Bilenker (jewelry maker)
John Blake, Jr. (jazz violinist/composer/arranger)
Kara Crombie (video artist)
William Daley (clay artist)
Orrin Evans (jazz pianist/composer/arranger)
Germaine Ingram (tap performer/choreographer)
Hanna Khoury (violinist/classical Arab musician)
Tina Morton (documentary filmmaker)
Jenny Sabin (architect/designer)
James Sugg (solo theater artist/sound designer/composer)
Charles “Chuck” Treece (multi-instrumentalist/producer/songwriter)
We don’t know the majority of these artists and we assume they are deserving and we congratulate them all.
But at a time when the visual arts scene in Philadelphia is so exciting, we are reading this movement by Pew away from cutting edge visual arts as a bellweather of future actions by Pew. In other words, Pew’s shift in focus is a loss for individual visual artists not working in traditional areas. We don’t want to question the nominating process, the secret first entry level of names for this award — that’s a whole other discussion. We do take this as an institutional shift in direction.
It’s our belief that one reason artists have been moving to Philadelphia and staying here is the Pew (of course cheap rents, proximity to New York and the massive amount of energy in the Philly art scene right now are other big reasons). But to have this shift in focus at Pew at the same time that the PA Council on the Arts has put their fellowships in abeyance, well it’s a low blow for the burgeoning art scene.
On the bright side, it does look Pew has moved beyond the usual suspects. Meanwhile we’ll have to lick our wounds and move on to thinking about the Knight Foundation Arts Challenge.
Tags: pew fellowships in the arts
Point well made but…we are delighted that one of the Pew winners, Kara Crombie, is a full-time faculty member in our Dept. of Photographic Imaging at Community College of Philadelphia. Her video work is complex animation with intricate stories involving thought provoking cultural criticism. Seems “visual” to me.
From the Philadelphia Inquirer:
“Those selected for the $60,000 awards were tapped first by an anonymous group of nominators, then vetted by a batch of “evaluators,” and finally selected by a small panel of artists and arts officials.”
This is the first I’ve heard of “evaluators vetting” anything in betwixt the nominating and the deciding. Sounds a bit like “hand-pickin’”.
In a move that seems overkill/cya Pew lists 9 panelists and 32 evaluators….a list mostly lacking visual arts experts
2010 Pew Fellowships in the Arts Panelists
Robert H. Browning
Artistic Director, World Music Institute, New York City
Don Byron
Clarinetist, saxophonist, composer, and arranger, Boiceville, NY
Emilya Cachapero (Panel Chair)
Director of Artistic Programs and International Theatre Institute-US, Theatre Communications Group, New York City
Lane Czaplinski
Artistic Director, On the Boards, Seattle, WA
Tania Leon
Conductor and composer, Nyack, NY
Bebe Miller
Artistic Director, Bebe Miller Dance Company, New York City
Robert Pinsky
Poet, translator, essayist, and former U.S. poet laureate, Cambridge, MA
Ezra Shales
Artist and Assistant Professor, School of Art & Design New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University
Elizabeth Sussman
Curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City
2010 Pew Fellowships in the Arts Evaluators
Claire Aguilar, Vice President of Programming Independent Television Service, San Francisco, CA
Christopher Barreca, Designer and Head of Scene Design, California Institute for the Arts, Los Angeles
Wally Cardona, Choreographer and Artistic Director, WCV, Inc., New York City
Julie Carr, Poet and Assistant Professor of English, University of Colorado, Boulder
Gerald Whitney Cleaver, Jazz drummer and band leader, Brooklyn, NY
Henri Cole, Poet, Boston, MA; Professor, Ohio State University Department of English, Columbus
Cornelius Eady, Poet, New York City; Associate Professor of Creative Writing, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN
Rinde Eckert, Writer, composer, performer, and director, Nyack, NY
Anne Ellegood, Senior Curator, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA
Laura Faure, Director, Bates Dance Festival, Portland, ME
Janie Geiser, Experimental filmmaker, visual and performance artist, and Director, Center for Puppetry and the Arts, California Institute for the Arts, Los Angeles
Jennifer Gross, Seymour H. Knox Jr. Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT
Constance Valis Hill, Choreographer, dance historian, and Professor of Dance, Five College, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA
Brooke Hodge, Director, Exhibition Management and Publications, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; former curator of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA
Bill Horrigan, Director of Media Arts, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH
Paul Lisicky, Author, East Hampton, NY
Fiona McCrae, Director, Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, MN
Tom Moon, Music critic, National Public Radio, Haddonfield, NJ
Jason Moran, Jazz pianist and composer, New York City
Ethel Raim, Artistic Director, Center for Traditional Music & Dance, New York City
Shulamit Ran, Composer and Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professor of Music, University of Chicago, IL
Anne Rasmussen, Associate Professor of Music and Ethnomusicology, College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA
Daniel Reed, Associate Professor of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, University of Indiana, Bloomington
Joseph Rosa, Director, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor; former John H. Bryan Curator of Architecture and Design, Art Institute of Chicago, IL
Mark Russell, Artistic Director and Producer, Under the Radar Festival, The Public Theater, New York City
Cindi Strauss, Curator, Modern and Contemporary Decorative Arts and Design, Museum of the Fine Arts, Houston, TX
Steven Stucky, Composer and Given Foundation Professor of Composition, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
Nato Thompson, Chief Curator, Creative Time, Inc., New York City
Edwin Torres, Poet, Hopewell Junction, NY
Gilbert Vicario, Curator, Des Moines Art Center, IA
Brian Wallis, Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Chief Curator, International Center of Photography, New York City
Namita Wiggers, Curator, Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR
Well, Pew announced they were trying a new way of doing their selections–about a year ago. The response was major angst if we’re to judge by the comments on the blog’s posts. Ever the optimists, we thought it might be refreshing–a way to get beyond the usual! Clearly, the new method has shaken things up a bit–but not quite in the way we had hoped. I suppose the moral here is be careful what you wish for.