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SD Art PRIZE: Recognition of Excellence in the Visual Arts SD ART PRIZE, a cash prize with exhibition opportunities, spotlights three established San Diego artists and three emerging artists each season whose outstanding achievements in the field of Visual Arts merit the recognition. 2009 SD ART PRIZE RECIPIENTS 2007/2008 SD ART PRIZE RECIPIENTS 2006-2007 SD ART PRIZE RECIPIENTS 2007/2008 New Contemporaries: Emerging Artists nominated for the SD Art Prize
The story of how Kim MacConnel named his most recent series of pictures, Women with Mirror, tells a lot about the artist and the man. It is not surprising that he would be interested in the pattern in the backgrounds of Pablo Picasso’s paintings. Pattern Painting has been the genre most associated with MacConnel. But MacConnel decided that just as Picasso had used African art as the subject of his work and added backgrounds of pattern, he would look at those backgrounds and take out the subject matter. Sounds good on paper, doesn’t it? But when he actually began his research, MacConnel found very little pattern in any of the Picasso works that related to his sketches. Finally, Women in A Mirror, was the one work where he saw a connection. It is amazing that so slight an inspiration could produce a body of works that is so intriguing and so ongoing. We will be showing the Age of Plastic series, a precursor to those new works, during the exhibition for the SD Art Prize 2009 coming to the L-Street Gallery of the Omni Hotel in the spring. The title is an ironic reference to the Guggenheim's 1993 sculpture exhibition The Age of Steel. MacConnel choose two of the most despicable trends of our times that he could think of….clowns and beach trash and used the cleverest of combinations to make trash into treasure. In his March 1995 article in Art In American, Michael Duncan says, “With its eye-grabbing commercial palette and hard-candy texture, plastic rubble provides a perfect medium for MacConnel….. MacConnel's clowns are both formally rigorous and playful, yet their lowly medium heads off any possibility of pretentiousness.” Born in Oklahoma City, MacConnel’s family comes from San Diego but he was raised on both coasts and in the Texas and Mexico as well. He currently teaches at the University of California, San Diego. The first showing of the Age of Plastic was at Holly Solomon Gallery, New York followed by Thomas Solomon's Garage, Los Angeles and finally Clowntown was displayed at the Quint Gallery, San Diego all in 1994. This series was included in Kim MacConnel- - Selected works from 1974 - 1996, at the California Center for the Arts, Escondido, California in 1997 and Parrot Talk: A Retrospective of Works by Kim MacConnel curated by Michael Duncan, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, California in 2003. Clowning Around was shown at Margeaux Kurtie Modern Art, Madrid, New Mexico in 2001. Amy Goldin, an influential UCSD visiting professor while MacConnel was in school in the 70’s, put forward the concept that pattern is not just the repetition of a motif but the rhythms created between the motifs. MacConnel has explored these and other very formal aesthetic concerns with a continuous nod to art history. His fearless use of color and his mesmerizing pattern is why these works breathe with the joy of life. Kim MacConnel is represented by Quint Contemporary Art, La Jolla and Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Santa Monica  “Brian Dick’s art constructed from everyday vernacular materials emerges from a process of play and are purposefully temporary-not works meant to last over time. Each morning since 1997 whether at home, visiting family or on a vacation trip, Dick transforms the mattress, sheets, pillows, blankets, and even the frame of the bed into a temporary sculpture, costume or performance. Dick documents these creations and actions with color photography. The ten year duration of the series, Making My Bed, is a testament to Dick’s commitment to the idea as well as to his self-imposed ritual. The results are: a bump in a mattress caused by the bedding, which has been placed underneath it; diapered monster outfit and mask (performed by the artist’s mother); or an upright totem. For a new project, Dick has been designing mascots for select museums constructed from recycled clothing, crocheted afghan throws, and consumable domestic materials such as paper cups and clothes pins. In so doing , museums are thereby treated to the same emblematic form as is common for sports teams. The mascots take the shape of sculptural masks that are worn in impromptu performances in a variety of public settings. Related posters and handbills expand the absurdist gestures of both the bed and mascot projects.” Betti-Sue Hertz, Curator SDMA for Inside the Wave: Six San Diego/Tijuana artists construct social art. Dick was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico and raised in Southern California. He received his B.A. from UCLA and, after graduating with an MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 1995 Dick accepted a six week residency at Arteleku in San Sebastian, Spain. Shortly thereafter he was invited to an extended residency through The American Center in Paris where he stayed for two years. He appeared in several group shows including shows at The Center George Pompidou, The Musée d’art moderne and in spaces in Denmark and the Netherlands. Additionally, he had solo shows at Gallerie Chez Valentin, Paris, France and Gandy Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic. He also appeared in two of the first ever web-based shows in France. Since returning to San Diego, he has participated in shows and film festivals in San Diego, Dallas, Houston, Reno, Kyoto, Japan and Berlin. In 2007/2008 Dick had solo shows at Spacecraft Gallery and Luis de Jesus Seminal Projects. Also in 2008 he participated in the group show Inside the Wave (with Christen Sperry-Garcia) at the San Diego Museum of Art as well Childsplay at The New Children’s Museum, San Diego. In 2009, among other things, Dick will be participating in Bushwick: SITE, a performance fair in Brooklyn, NY, as well as a guest curator at Sushi Visual Arts Space, San Diego, CA. Dick lives and works in Southern California. More work can be seen at the artist's website.
Richard Allen Morris was born in Long Beach, CA in 1933. Morris is self taught exploring his enormous interest in art history with no formal art education. He began exhibiting at the age of 26. He served in the Korean War leaving the service in 1956. His first solo show was in 1959 and has had solo and group exhibitions throughout California since. He currently lives and works in San Diego. Morris’s works are firmly anchored in the Abstract Expressionist school. The handling of the paint is always seductive and he managed to transfer that same feeling to his collaged works. You feel these collages are gathered from the snipes and off cuts found in the waste areas of his studio which he spins into gold. He has the obsessive nature of many great artists and has produced a large body of work which treads the line between great sophistication and a child like glee in the world around him. Morris has been recognized recently in Germany and Switzerland where his work is much in demand. He has been the focus of many exhibitions and catalogues. Richard Allen Morris: Retrospective, 1958-2005 was an exhibition that includes 150 paintings made over the course of his fifty-year career organized by Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld and shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego in 2005. Published in Art Scene which is the guide to exhibitions in Southern California of show at Mandarin Gallery in Los Angles in 2006 was this statement about the show Body and Soul. “ Richard Allen Morris’ brand of eye candy sets up this challenge: how much visual incident can be squeezed onto the head of a pin? The effect of walking into a roomful of these impastoed dandies will immediately either put a smile on your face or raise your hackles. But the decorative indulgence is beside the point. Let yourself get your nose up to these things, then step back again so you can go along on Morris’ ride. His deft brush takes us to a surprisingly wide variety of places without having appeared to have done very much. “ From this same show David Pagel writes in Special to The Times for the Around the Galleries feature, “…..playful combination of paint squeezed straight from the tube and slathered on with a palette knife resembles the aftermath of a food fight between Matisse and Gauguin.” Richard Allen Morris is represented by RB Stevenson Gallery, La Jolla.
Tom Driscoll was born in San Diego, California in 1945 and lived in Mission Beach between the ages of one to eight years old. At the age of eight, his family moved to the more arid terrain of Chula Vista when his father went to work at Rohr Corporation a part of San Diego’s aerospace industry. Driscoll was drawn to sculpture early. “A point where I realized I was good with my hands occurred when I was a senior in high school. In an art class I started stone cutting and direct carving on wood. One of my pieces ended up being displayed at the school library. It was the first pat on the back I recall receiving.” Those early carvers - Moore, Brancusi and Hepworth - turned his head. After high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and served with the 82 nd Airborne. Upon returning to San Diego he enrolled at Southwestern College. His exposure to the “Artist Lecture Series” - the guests included Robert Irwin, Paul Brach, Newton Harrison, moderated by John Baldessari. - captured his attention as no other class had up to that point. A significant change in Tom’s career occurred in 1981 when he moved to downtown San Diego. Here he encountered several artists living and working in cheap commercial spaces: Richard Allen Morris, Lynn Engstrom, Barbara Sexton, Gillian Theobald, Carl Peck, Lynn Schuette, Richard Sigmund, William Gambini, Jay Johnson and Gary Ghirardi. “We would each arrive at night after our day jobs to work in our studios. At that time a number of art galleries opened in downtown San Diego: Patty Aande, The Pawn Shop, 552 Gallery, Newmyer, and later Quint Gallery and Sumay Space. These galleries brought all of us together.” Driscoll’s work has received critical acclaim and has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Southern California, i.e. Mandarian Gallery in Los Angeles and Quint Gallery in San Diego. Best known for his cast cement and large-scale sculptures (cones and spheres), Driscoll has produced a body of diversified work over the years including a recent series where he used Styrofoam and vacuum formed plastic packaging as molds. The inner negative spaces of the material produced an array of abstract shapes replacing the original product. With his masterful handling of material, Tom Driscoll is currently producing an intriguing series of cast epoxy – mysterious in their deep red and amber translucency. Richard Allen Morris and Tom Driscoll share qualities of honesty, perseverance and a respect for art history. San Diego has benefited from their continued presence.
Eleanor Antin is internationally renown for her work in photography, video, film, performance, installation, drawing, and writing. She has had one-woman exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum, etc. as well as a major 30 year retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art which published a book ELEANOR ANTIN by Howard Fox. Her retrospective also traveled to the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis and toured the U.K. She has been in major group exhibitions at the Hirschhorn Museum, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Kunsthalle Wien, the Sydney Biennale, and the Beaubourg, among others. Please note: Eleanor Antin: Historical Takes will be on display at the San Diego Museum of Art from
Pamela Jaeger lives in San Diego and graduated from San Diego State University where she obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in Graphic Design. She has studied drawing, painting, color theory, costuming and design. The influence of costume design is apparent in many of her painted characters. She studies fashion and beauty traditions of the past and also finds inspiration for paintings in childhood memories, dreams and journal writings to create a story of truth and fiction. In her paintings she creates an ethereal, fanciful world for the characters to live in.  San Diego based artist Roman de Salvo received a BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, CA and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA. In his sculptures and installations, de Salvo manages to be both restrained and high-spirited, blending his fascination for machines and craftsmanship with an interest in language and wordplay. He has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, including solo shows at Quint Contemporary Art, La Jolla (2001), CA, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, CA (1998). Recent group exhibitions include Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast in Contemporary Art, Seattle Art Museum, WA (2003; traveled), and the 2002 California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA (2002). He's taken his skills into their largest arena yet with “Nexus Eucalyptus,” which he and his crew are installing at the new Caltrans District 11 headquarters in Old Town. The 115-foot-long, 50-foot-wide construction in wood is more readily recognizable as an art object than many of his creations. But it shares with them his sense of play and the ability to execute with precision an imaginative, outlandish concept. Roman de Salvo was the only local artist commissioned to create work for the new Museum of Contemporary Art in the David C. Copley building in downtown San Diego with multiple works from the Electrical Conduit Series. His work,Utility Filigree, is located in the Kresge Foundation Stairway and is comprised of de Salvo’s modular macramé, made from electrical conduit, boxes, and connectors—materials that are customarily hidden within the finished surfaces of buildings. The stairway where the work is located has a raw, industrial, and utilitarian feel, and the modular macramé has a similar feel yet it is also decorative. With modular macramé, these materials are used as ornamentation as well as functionally at MCASD to provide lighting in the stairway. Interview available with the artist courtesy of the New Children's Museum of San Diego.
Lael Corbin is a San Diego based artist. His work has taken the form of installation, individual sculptures and photography. He lived in Hawaii where he studied figure sculpture at the Honolulu Art Academy. He received his MFA in sculpture from San Diego State University in 2007. Currently he teaches drawing, design and photography in the Department of Art and Design at Point Loma Nazarene University, as well as overseeing their workshops and facilities. His installations and sculpture have been seen at local venues such as the Produce Gallery, San Diego State University, and The University of California, San Diego as well as Simayspace Gallery at the SD Art Academy.
Marcos Ramirez "Erre" was born in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico in 1961. He studied law at the Universidad Autonoma de Baja California. He has exhibited throughout Mexico and in the United States since 1993. His most critically acclaimed installations have been "Century 21” for inSite '94, and "Toy and Horse" for inSite '97. His most "memorable exhibition", as Robert Pincus writes, was "Amor como primer idioma/Love As First Language" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego in 1999. In the year 2000 at the Whitney Biennial, he presented "Stripes and Fence Forever - Homage to Jasper Johns," a metal structure in which two flags (Mexico and the United States) are built as if they were the fence that divides Tijuana and San Diego. Excerpt from Whitney Biennial, 2000. “ Marcos Ramirez, also know as “ERRE” from the Spanish pronunciation of the first letter in his surname, creates large-scale public installations informed by a political and social consciousness......he addresses the dynamics of the border between the United States and Mexico....and calling attention to the gap between poverty and wealth in Mexico by building a shanty and yard with discarded construction materials and setting it against the showy exhibition facade (inSite94). For InSite 97, he installed a 33-foot-tall wood horse with wheels on the boundary line between the US and Mexico. This evocation of the Trojan horse had two heads, raising questions about who was invading whom.”
Allison Wiese is an interdisciplinary artist who makes sculptures, installations, sound works and architectural interventions.. Wiese learned to walk and talk in Brooklyn, drive in southern California and everything else important in Texas. Her work makes poetry with the ready-to-hand, altering spaces through christening and commemoration. Wiese's projects often employ the diversion of commodities or language through space and time. She recently negotiated a large awning off an empty office tower in downtown Houston, for instance, and installed it, capsized, on the floor of a tiny residentially-scaled gallery. She has also developed a site-specific solar audio work for the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. In the above work, archaic sentiments grace highway signs fabricated according to contemporary standards for cultural and historical attractions. Root Hog or Die is one of a series that also includes: I Ain’t Rich But I’m Free and Industry Need Not Want Artist Statement: “ I am interested in work that makes poetry with the ready-to-hand, and my sculptures, installations and architectural interventions often employ simple material diversions to make meaning. I’m just as likely to drag ideas through time - my recent work finds its vocabulary within a certain vein of populist Americana. I’m interested (with a simultaneous and perverse kind of hopelessness and optimism) in re-plumbing the social and political landscape of the near past as a way of both querying the lingering presence and viability of certain very American myths and pointing to truths about the present. The materials and subjects I choose are the result of an ornery insistence on using stuff from everyday experience, minimally transformed, as relevant art material – often dragging it into the space of the art institution to point to a different kind of (infinitely less sterile) space and experience.”“Ernest Silva is a consummate painter, sculptor and installation artist with an individual vision and distinctive vocabulary. His work is an expression of mankind’s eternal longings and fears, and in his world human beings are restless souls on a lonely journey through a sometimes, dark environment filled with risk and danger,” comments Mary Beebe, director of the Stuart Collection. Ernest Silva received a BFA from the University of Rhode Island in 1971 and an MFA from Tyler School of Art in 1974. Since 1972, his work has been shown in over 45 one person shows and over 150 group shows. His one person shows have included the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Artists Space, New York; Laguna Museum of Art, California; Art Resources Transfer, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilds, Denmark; and numerous gallery exhibitions in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. In 1989, he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Painting and in 1995; he was the artist in residence at the National Workshops for Arts and Crafts, Copenhagen, Denmark, known as Gammel Dok. Mr. Silva has been commissioned to construct several public art projects in the San Diego/Tijuana region. His public projects include a permanent installation at the Children's Museum of San Diego, 1995; the Casa de la Cultura, Tijuana, 1994; and the Centro Cultural Tijuana
“May Ling’s artwork shows the impact of the cultural aesthetic with which she grew up, as well as the effect of her strong family ties. From her father, an engineer, she inherited an interest in logic and mathematics, which is reflected in her repeated use of numbers, ledger paper and mechanical imagery. After a brief career as a secretary, her mother became a homemaker, and inspired Martinez’s fascination with household objects and the concept of “home” as a symbol for domestic happiness,” says Tina Yapelli, director of SDSU’s University Art Gallery. California-based artist Jean Lowe earned her MFA at the University of California, San Diego in 1988, the same year she presented her first solo exhibition at the Dietrich Jenny Gallery in Downtown San Diego. Lowe earned her BA at the University of California, Berkeley and was the winner of the first Alberta duPont Bonsal Foundation Art Prize in 2000. For 18 years, Lowe has been inspired and challenged to make work that is visually seductive, viscerally engaging, but also provocative in its critique of how we live in relation to other species and the environment. Lowe enjoys creating artwork that tackles difficult issues such as over-development, exploitation of the environment, sex, power, and the widespread mistreatment of animals. “I'm motivated,” says Lowe, “by a desire to stimulate conversation around issues I think are important, and challenged by the desire to do so in a way that is engaging and playful as opposed to dry and didactic.” Her work ranges from traditional painting and sculpture to her most common medium, enamel-painted papier-mâché. “At L Street Gallery, I'll be exhibiting one brand new large scale landscape and a couple of existing works that will hopefully have a nice conceptual resonance with the work Iana will be showing.”
Iana Quesnell is from the southern states and is currently in the Masters Program at UCSD. Iana’s current work is about temporary living situations, specificity of place, as well as, navigation through the spaces she occupies and intends to occupy. Whether that be a military tent in Bosnia, her car, a studio on the border in Tijuana, or the Omni Hotel (for a week for this project), each incorporates architectural floor plans and schematic rendering with more experiential and ephemeral details. A viewer is initially pulled in to the work by its beautiful draftsmanship and the surprise of its scale but it’s the conceptual underpinnings that seal the deal. She’s quite literally drafting her life and this odd combination of technical drawing and autobiography yields an unexpected and original narrative. Iana Quesnell engages drawing as a mediating tool between her own body and her immediate surroundings. Often painfully honest these exceptional, large scale drawings take into account her every move with excruciating detail. Both Lowe (the established artist) and Quesnell (the emerging artist) have a fascination with places that humans occupy. Lowe’s concentration is on an impersonal level as it relates to “plunked down communities” that she feels has no aesthetic appeal while Quesnell’s interest is on a deeply personal level as she shares specific relationships with the places she inhabits. The visual contrast is strikingly different, Lowe uses a more traditional painterly style while Quesnell’s works as a draftsman with graphite on paper.
Raul Guerrero graduated from the Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles in 1970, BFA. He held his first one person exhibition at the Cirrus Gallery in 1974, which was followed by numerous solo and joint exhibitions in such diverse cities as San Francisco, Santa Fe, New York, Madrid and Tokyo to name a few. Significant among these were a retrospective survey of his artwork at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in 1998. In 2006 he kicked off a series of exhibits beginning in April with a show at the Billy Shire Fine Arts Gallery in Culver City: Problemas y Secretos Maravillosos de Las Indies/ Problems and Marvelous Secrets of the Indies , which ran fromApril 15 - May 20, 2006. Guerrero is currently part of the Strange New World: Art and Design from Tijuana, which is running concurrently at both MCASD Downtown and MCASD La Jolla. His work will be featured at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, as part of the exhibition: Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge running from July 22 - October 22, which includes works of some of the country’s best Chicano and Chicana artists. Works by Guerrero are also currently being featured in Ravenna Italy at the Galleria Ninapi. YVONNE VENEGAS emerging artist showing with Raul Guerrero
2007/2008 New Contemporaries: Emerging Artists nominated for the SD Art Prize
New Contemporaries II: Emerging Artists nominated for the 2009 SD Art Prize
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