Call for Entries Artscape Presents The 2010 Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize

Made possible through the support of The Abell Foundation, Alex. Brown Charitable Foundation, The Henry and Ruth Blaustein Rosenberg Foundation, Charlesmead Foundation, Ellen Dankert, France-Merrick Foundation, Willard Hackerman, Legg Mason and Anonymous.

Application deadline – December 18, 2009

The Office of Promotion & The Arts, Inc. (BOPA) is proud to announce the fifth edition of the Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize. The prize will award a $25,000 fellowship to a visual artist or visual artist collaborators living and working in the Baltimore region. The prize is in conjunction with the annual Artscape juried exhibition and is produced with our partners, The (BMA) and the Institute College of Art (MICA). Approximately six finalists will be selected for the final review for the prize. Their work will be exhibited in the Thalheimer Gallery of The Baltimore Museum of Art. Additionally, an exhibition of the semi-finalists’ work will be shown in the Decker and Meyerhoff galleries of the Maryland Institute College of Art during the Artscape weekend.

The fellowship winner will be selected from The Baltimore Museum of Art exhibition after review of the installed art and an interview with each finalist by the jurors. The remaining finalists not selected for the fellowship will each receive a $1,000 honorarium. Artist collaborators if chosen as the winner will receive a single $25,000 prize or $1,000 honorarium that will be equally divided among the members of the group.

The Artscape prize is named in honor of Janet and Walter Sondheim who have been instrumental in creating the Baltimore City that exists today. Walter Sondheim, Jr. had been one of Baltimore’s most important civic leaders for over 50 years. His accomplishments included oversight of the desegregation of the Baltimore City Public Schools in 1954 when he was president of the Board of School Commissioners of Baltimore City. Later, he was deeply involved in the development of Charles Center and the Inner Harbor. He continued to be active in civic and educational activities in the city and state and served as the senior advisor to the Greater Baltimore Committee until his death in February 2007.

Janet Sondheim danced with the pioneering Denishawn Dancers, a legendary dance troupe founded by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. Later, she turned to teaching where she spent 15 years at the Children’s Guild working with severely emotionally disturbed children. After retirement, she was a volunteer tutor at Highlandtown Elementary School. She married Walter in 1934, and they were together until her death in 1992.

Jurors Robert Nickas is an independent New York-based curator, writer and art critic; who over the past 25 years has organized more than 80 exhibitions that have been shown in museums and galleries throughout the world. Responsible for Aperto at the Venice Biennale in 1993 and the 2003 Biennale de Lyon, his most recent exhibition Cave Paintings premiered in July in Berlin at PSM Gallery, and was produced in October and November in New York by Grisham’s Ghost at 511 West 25th Street in Manhattan. This exhibition is an accompaniment to his latest book, Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting (October 2009); a remarkable volume that highlights the current work of 80 contemporary artists. A regular contributor to Artforum and a founding editor of Index magazine, he has also authored countless essays in exhibition catalogues and artists’ monographs. His other books include two collections of his writings, Live Free or Die (2000) and Theft is Vision (2007). From 2003 to 2006, he served as curatorial advisor at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York.

Magdalena Sawon is the owner and director of Postmasters Gallery in New York. Begun in December 1984 in the East Village, Postmasters Gallery relocated to Soho in 1989 and in September 1998 moved to its current 4,000 sq. ft. ground floor space in Chelsea. Postmasters Gallery is one of the few commercial galleries that actively seeks both young and established artists working with new technologies to create their work. This emphasis began with their, at the time, unique and now seminal exhibition in 1996, Can you digit?; which was comprised of approximately 30 monitors arranged in a boat- like shape, each showing a singular digital work. Along with artists working in video and new media, Postmasters Gallery’s current roster of artists includes those working in painting, sculpture and installation. Ms. Sawon has also served on Rhizome’s Board of Directors from 2002 until 2005, a New York-based organization whose mission is to support the creation, presentation, preservation and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage new technologies.

Hamza Walker, who grew up in Baltimore, has been the director of education and associate curator of the Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago, a non- collecting museum devoted to contemporary art, since 1994. Prior to his current position, he held the post of public art coordinator in Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs. His curatorial projects include the exhibitions Several Silences; Black Is, Black Ain’t; Meanwhile in Bagdad; All the Pretty Corpses; A Perfect Union…More or Less and New Video, New Europe, among several others. He has written for the journals Trans, New Art Examiner, Parkett and Artforum; as well as contributed catalogue essays for several artists including Rebecca Morris, Thomas Hirschhorn and Katharina Grosse. He was the recipient of the 1999 Norton Curatorial Grant, the Menil Collection’s 2005 Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement, and is a finalist in the Curator/Arts Writer category for the New Museum’s 2010 Ordway Prize. He is among the graduate faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently on the board of The Chicago Public Art Group.

Review Process The selection process will occur in three phases. 1st Review –Jurors will review applicants’ submissions independent of each other. They will complete score sheets that will be tabulated to select approximately 40 semi-

2 finalists. Submissions will consist of five (5) digital images of work or up to ten (10) minutes of time based work and a resume.

2nd Review – Semi-finalists will be asked to submit an expanded submission including up to 30 images and a description of how they will use the fellowship if they are selected. The review process will be the same as phase one. Approximately six finalists will be selected for the exhibition and final review. Each finalist will meet with a BMA curator and BOPA staff person to determine installation requirements. Works by the remaining semi-finalists will be selected for a separate exhibition at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Final Review – The finalists will install work in the Thalheimer Gallery of The Baltimore Museum of Art. On Saturday, July 10, 2010 the jurors will meet with each artist for up to 30 minutes in their exhibition space for a final interview. After all of the interviews the jurors will meet and decide the fellowship award winner. The award will be announced later that evening at the award reception.

Application Materials Application should include: - A CD-Rom containing 5 jpeg images of work. Image files on the CD should be titled exactly as follows: last name first, first name, and number corresponding to the image description sheet. Each image should be sized at approximately 1024 x 768 pixels no larger than 1 Mb per image; compatible with both Mac and PC formats.

- Artists submitting time based works may submit up to ten (10) minutes of work on a DVD. The 10 minutes may include excerpts from up to 5 works as long as the combined time totals no more than 10 minutes. If you wish to submit still and time based works, please include the still images as jpegs. For every still image subtract 2 minutes from the allowed 10 minute time based total.

- A hard copy of a one page resume.

- A signed and filled out application and image description form.

- A $25 application fee. Check should be made out to BOPA.

- No application materials will be returned.

Guidelines 1. Artists living and working in Maryland; Washington, DC; Delaware; Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William counties and the city of Alexandria in Virginia; and Adams, Chester, Franklin, Lancaster and York counties in Pennsylvania are eligible to submit for this award. 2. Artists may not be full-time students at the time of the exhibition and during the granting period. Students who will have graduated by the time of the exhibition and granting period may apply. 3. Artists must live and work in one of the geographic areas listed above during time of application and during the entire granting period.

3 4. Artists who work in collaboration may apply as a group. Each artist’s name and contact information should be listed on the application form. A one page resume for the collaborative group and a single set of support materials should be submitted. Each individual member of the collaborative group must meet all other guidelines. 5. Semi-finalists will be required to submit a description of how they will use the fellowship if they are selected. 6. The award will be paid in monthly installments. $5,200 will be paid for the first month and $1,800 will be paid for each of the following 11 months. If artist collaborators are selected the above payments will be equally divided between the collaborating artists. 7. Winners of the Sondheim Prize will be responsible for paying all applicable federal, state and local taxes. 8. Artists’ work included in the Semi-finalist Exhibition at the Maryland Institute College of Art will be insured during the exhibition duration by BOPA; artists’ work included in the Finalists exhibition at the BMA will be insured by that organization while the artwork is on the premises of the BMA . 9. Winners of the Sondheim Prize will be required to file a final report by June 30, 2011, before the final payment. This report should include an explanation of how winning this prize has enabled the artist or artist collaborative group to further develop their work, as well as an explanation of any additional opportunities that may have arisen as a result of winning this prize. 10. Work submitted for this prize will also be made available to curators of the Artscape City-County Exhibitions. Please visit www.artscape.org for a listing of galleries participating in the City-County Exhibitions. 11. Artscape and BOPA reserve the right to reproduce images of selected artists’ work for printed or internet publicity, catalogue or marketing purposes. The BMA and MICA also will have the right to reproduce work relating to the 2010 Sondheim Prize. 12. Submissions must be postmarked or hand delivered by 5pm, December 18, 2009. No late submissions will be accepted 13. The decisions of the jurors are final. Jurors may change without notification. 14. Finalists will be required to meet with a BMA curator and BOPA staff to finalize their installation needs; these needs must meet the exhibition guidelines set forth by the BMA. 15. Finalists may be required to make public presentations at the BMA at some time during the duration of the exhibition, including during the awards ceremony. 16. Previous winners of the Sondheim Prize are not eligible to apply. Previous finalists and semi-finalists may apply. 17. BOPA employees and/or relatives (defined as children, spouse, domestic partner or parents) are not eligible to participate in the Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize.

Submissions Deadline December 18, 2009, postmarked or hand delivered by 5pm to: Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts 7 East Redwood Street, Suite 500 Baltimore, MD 21202 No email submissions will be accepted

4 Timeline Application deadline, Friday, December 18, 2009 Announcement of semi-finalists, Tuesday, February 16, 2010 Announcement of finalists, Tuesday, April 13, 2010 BMA exhibition installation, Monday, June 7 through Wednesday, June 18, 2010 BMA exhibition duration, Saturday, June 19, 2010 through Sunday, August 1, 2010 Finalist interviews, Saturday, July 10, 2010 Award announcement, Saturday, July 10, 2010 at 7pm MICA exhibition artwork drop-off, Sunday, July 11, 2010 and Monday, July 12, 2010 MICA exhibition duration, July 16 through August 1, 2010 Artscape, July 16-19, 2010

For more information contact: Kim Domanski at 410-752-8632 or [email protected]

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APPLICATION Artscape Presents 2010 Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize Name:______

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Return To: Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts 7 East Redwood Street, Suite 500 Baltimore, MD 21202 www.promotionandarts.com www.artscape.org

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