Each May, the UW–Madison Division of the Arts celebrates artistic achievement, recognizes service to the arts, and supports arts research by bestowing the Awards in the Creative Arts.
And once again, artists associated with the School of Education were recipients of these honors. Fred Stonehouse received the Creative Arts Award and Leslie Smith III was recognized with the Emily Mead Baldwin Award in the Creative Arts.
Nominations for these awards are juried by a panel of seven previous recipients of the Awards and campus arts research administrators. Five awards for a total of $61,500 were bestowed this year.
“The Creative Arts Awards are integral to recognizing and supporting the research excellence generated by UW–Madison artists,” stated Susan Zaeske, interim director of the Division of the Arts. “Each of the honorees expands artistic knowledge within their specific discipline and advances the Wisconsin Idea.”
Zaeske expressed regret that this year we are unable to celebrate the recipients at a Creative Arts Awards ceremony, and thanked the donors that make the awards possible as well as members of the selection committee.
Stonehouse is a professor with the Art Department whose work has been variously characterized as neo-surrealism, fabulism, magic realism, and pop surrealism. He had his first solo show in Chicago in 1983 and his work is shown on a regular basis at the Carl Hammer Gallery in Chicago, Howard Scott Gallery in New York, and at the Koplin/DelRio Gallery in Los Angeles. Besides domestic exhibitions, he has exhibited in Germany, Italy, Mexico, and the Netherlands. He has been the recipient of an NEA Arts Midwest Grant and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Individual Artists Grant and was the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in 2015. He received his BFA from UW-Milwaukee and began the academic aspect of his career in 2006.
Stonehouse’s new project will reference various common outsider and vernacular folk forms such as lawn ornaments, butler ashtray stands, and figural signs to create works that sit somewhere between painting and sculpture. Many of the works will go beyond 2D format to a 3D format and will be able to be viewed from all sides. A number of these works will be large in scale and will include antique stepladders and wooden doors. This project will incorporate Stonehouse’s personal research in “outsider aesthetics,” which usually hasn’t been well documented or understood.
Smith, an associate professor with the Art Department, is an oil-based painter. His studio practice is centered on using abstraction to communicate the human experience. Smith received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and received his MFA from Yale University School of Art. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art. Recent exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Maus Contemporary in Birmingham, Alabama, and Galerie Isabelle Gounod in Paris along with exhibitions in Madrid and New York City.
The Emily Mead Baldwin Award in the Creative Arts will help Smith create a series of abstract paintings that includes industrial materials to expand, challenge, and alter the perception of what defines a “painting.” The purpose of this project is to empower an audience to evaluate contemporary abstraction, its relationship to race, culture, and identity. Smith’s series of “Bilateral Gestures” will emphasize African American contributions to the field with expectations of different sensibilities than those offered by first and second generation African American abstractionists.
The UW-Madison Division of the Arts also announced the recipients of The Studio Creative Arts Community’s Creative Arts Awards, with funding provided by the Division of the Arts.
Again, students studying with the School of Education were recognized.
The Studio Research Award — Siena Laws, Education Studies: Laws. will “investigate our inner thoughts and feelings in social settings: our anxieties, joys, and feelings of disconnection.” She plans to create wearable sculptures that participants can choose to interact with. These pieces will reflect those inner thoughts and feelings and lead to a discussion with participants on how they connected to the work in order to better understand the pressures of daily life.
The Studio Service Award — Malcolm McCanles, Department of Theatre and Drama, and Asher Bernick-Roehr, undeclared: McCanles and Bernick-Roehr will reference Raymond Carver’s book of short stories, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,”to examine connection and relationships in a COVID-affected world.
Their plan is to take each story in the book and give it to a performer to use as inspiration when creating their piece, in order to have a coherent theme and feeling running through the entire performance. Their main goal is to reference the book in order to create multi-disciplinary performances, which celebrate, analyze, critique, and explore connections and relationships.
To learn about all of this year’s award winners, check out this report from UW-Madison’s Division of the Arts.