Fellowship & Student Awards of Excellence Announced

Glenn Herbert Davis, Track aNd trolley, installation detail, 12'x24'x54'

The Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition is pleased to announce the Visual Arts Fellowship recipients for 2010 are Glenn Herbert Davis and Cedar Marie.  Student Awards of Excellence were given to Sarah Engel and Sherwin Tibayan.  Guest curator Liza Statton selected the awardees after reviewing artistic samples, resumes and artist statements. Her curatorial statement is below.

Cedar Marie, Old Man Jenkins, Mixed Media, 17'x5'x2"

The public can learn more about Fellowship recipients Davis and Marie when they give a free lecture this fall.  A feature article in the September/October issue of Art Focus Magazine will highlight all awardees. 43 artists applied for the $5,000 unrestricted Oklahoma Visual Arts Fellowships and 27 artists submitted applications for the $500 Student Awards of Excellence. 

Sherwin Tibayan, Off the Strip, Las Vegas, Archival Pigment Print, 24"x36"

These awards are intended to reward qualified artists with outstanding vision. Through the funds, OVAC recognizes past achievement and future promise, encouraging Oklahoma artists to keep making excellent work. OVAC has given a total of $122,000 to support artists through this program since 1989. To learn more about the Fellowship and Awards program and see information about past recipients, visit OVAC’s website.

Sarah Engel, Of Moss and Men, digital photograph, 8"x10"

Fellowship & Award Guest Curator Statement:

Liza Statton, 

Curator, ArtSpace, New Haven, CT

The four artists selected make compelling works that offer singular, yet collective views on our rapidly changing environment.  Each attempts to reclaim, re-contextualize, and re-imagine different parts of Oklahoma¹s physical and cultural landscape in ways that connect them to the broader social and environmental issues of our time. In their multi-media, performance-based practices, Sarah Engel and Glenn Herbert Davis stage interventions in rural and urban settings that challenge viewers' perceptions of themselves in the context of the post-industrial society that we inhabit.  Both artists use irony and humor to critique notions of authenticity and consumption. Themes of alienation and displacement underscore the works of Cedar Marie and Sherwin Tibayan.  In her installations and photographs, Cedar Marie uses familiar objects to address notions of otherness and loss. Sherwin Tibayan's photographs similarly speak to notions of loss. His photographs of blank billboards that populate our automotive-based landscape subtly question the disappearance of old media in a new media age. Through their individual artistic practices, each of these artists offers an alternative view to the problems and issues that we confront in our increasingly technologically determined age.