The Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts announces the finalists for the sixth annual Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize. The five finalists are Stephanie Barber, Louie Palu, Mark Parascandola, Matthew Porterfield and Rachel Rotenberg.
The competition awards a $25,000 fellowship to a visual artist or visual artist collaborators living and working in the Greater Baltimore region. The 2011 winner will be announced during an award ceremony on Saturday, July 9 at 7pm at The Baltimore Museum of Art, located at 10 Art Museum Drive. 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 Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) and Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). Finalists’ works will be exhibited in the Alvin and Fanny Blaustein Thalheimer Galleries of the BMA from Saturday, June 25 through Sunday, August 7. The fellowship winner is selected from the BMA exhibition after review of the installed art and an interview with each finalist by the jurors.
Stephanie Barber is a multi-media artist who creates writing, films and videos, as well as performance pieces that incorporate music, literature and video. Much of her work is informed by poetry and the poetics inherent in the formal concerns of all art. Her work has been extensively featured in festivals and venues around the world. These include the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of Art in New York; The Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, OH; London’s Tate Modern; the San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art and The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; the New York Film Festival; Film Festival Rotterdam; the London International Film Festival, among several other art spaces. She has had numerous books published including poems in 2006 and her short book for a lawn poem in 2007 by Publishing Genius. Her book these here separated to see how they standing alone or the soundtrack to six films by stephanie barber was published in May 2008 and 2010 by Publishing Genius – included in this book is her essay the inversion, transcription, evening track and attractor (the soundtrack for the video of the same name) which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
For the past five years, Louie Palu has focused his photography on a long-term project on the war in Afghanistan. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, TIME and Newsweek. His work has been featured in festivals and exhibitions nationally and internationally, among them the New York Photo Festival, Centrum for Fotografi in Stockholm, Ping Yao International Photography Festival in China, and the Prix de la Photographie Paris. The Portland Art Museum in Oregon, the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY and The Museum of
Fine Arts Houston have included his work in their permanent collections. He has received numerous awards for his photographs including The Hearst Photography Biennial award, Hasselblad Master Award, and the 2010 Alexia Foundation Photography Grant. Additionally, he was a semifinalist for the 2009 Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize.
Mark Parascandola is a photographer based in Washington, D.C. A doctor of epidemiology by training, he uses photography to explore patterns of movement in human populations, focusing on architecture as evidence of often-invisible social, environmental and economic processes. Parascandola has family roots in the desert landscape of Almeria, Spain, and he is currently documenting the remains of old movie sets constructed in the region during the 1960s and 1970s. His work has been featured in galleries in the Washington, D.C. area including DC Loft, Nevin Kelly Gallery and the Metropolitan Center for the Visual Arts in Rockville and is among the collection of the DC Art Bank. He is an active member of both the Washington Project for the Arts, as well as Mid City Artists collective.
Born in Baltimore, MD, Matt Porterfield studied film at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and currently teaches screenwriting, film theory and production at Johns Hopkins University. His first feature film, HAMILTON, which he wrote, directed and edited on 16mm film, was released in 2006. METAL GODS, his second feature script, won the Panasonic Digital Filmmaking Grand Prize at IFP’s 30th Annual Independent Film Week in 2008. In 2010, his latest film, PUTTY HILL, premiered at the Berlinale’s International Forum of New Cinema; and in February 2011, it was released by Cinema Guild. His films and videos have been screened in several venues and film festivals including AFI, The
Wexner Center, Centre Pompidou, the Swedish Film Institute, the George Eastman House, Viennale, Edinburgh and SXSW. Locally, Porterfield’s photographs have been shown at The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore’s Current Gallery and Gallery 229. He has been awarded a media grant from the Maryland State Arts Council and was a Janet& Walter Sondheim Prize finalist in 2010.
Growing up in Toronto, Canada, Rachel Rotenberg began making artwork very early in life. Focusing almost exclusively on sculpture, she received her bachelor of fine arts from York University in 1981. Shortly thereafter, she relocated to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and settled on wood as her primary medium – ever since, she has continuously created abstract wooden sculptures while raising five children. In 1994, she moved to Baltimore and has actively exhibited her work in many area galleries, including the Greater Reston Arts Centerin Reston, VA, Baltimore’s Creative Alliance at the Patterson, Sub-Basement Galleries in Baltimore, the Bodzin Art Gallery in Northern Virginia and the Decker Gallery at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She was a recipient of a 2009 Creative Baltimore Individual Artist Award and was a 2010 Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize semifinalist.
