Flintridge Foundation is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2003/2004 Awards for Visual Artists. Five artists from California and five from Oregon/Washington will receive unrestricted grants of $25,000 each. The fourth biennial Awards honor California, Oregon, and Washington artists working in fine arts and crafts media whose work demonstrates high artistic merit and a distinctive voice for 20 or more years. In addition, artists may not be nationally renowned, and they must have lived at least nine months per year in the tri-state region for the last three years. Since the Awards were first presented in 1997/1998, Flintridge’s support for individual artists has surpassed $1.1 million.
Among the 2003/2004 Award recipients is Los Angeles artist and Scripps College Fletcher Jones Professor in Art Susan Rankaitis. Rankaitis challenges traditional photographic and painting practices with her luminous and intricately layered montages. Starting out as an abstract painter, she was inspired by the solarized photograms of László Moholy-Nagy to use darkroom chemistry as a component of her multi-faceted approach. Her lengthy creative process begins with exposing up to 100 negatives on light-sensitive photographic paper, working section by section. Then, in what has been best described as artistic alchemy, Rankaitis employs various media and techniques–painting, bleaching, tinting, staining and collage–to transform the emulsion-coated surface into a rich topography of metallic tones and intermingled images. Her frequently large-scale investigations take months or even years to complete.
Says Rankaitis: “While I use various permutations of painting, photography, and drawing as tools in making the work, the content is derived from the shift of questions from the information systems I am most drawn to in everyday life.”
Her subject matter includes landscape, airplanes, technology and the sciences, particularly neuroscience and molecular genetics, often borrowing from diagrams and symbols that describe scientific principles. Over the past decade, Rankaitis focused on “overlapping, fractured representations of the brain and of DNA.” She is currently working with a neuroscientist, a molecular biologist and a dancer on two collaborative projects.
“The Awards celebrate the extraordinary talent and imagination arising from the tri-state region’s distinct artistic communities, varied cultural histories and diverse peoples. The resonant individual voices of the ten recipients have contributed greatly to this dynamic cultural landscape,” said Armando Gonzalez, Board President, Flintridge Foundation.
The 2003/2004 recipients range in age from 50 to 73 years. All demonstrate a deepening of ideas, skills and creativity throughout a lifelong dedication to making art. The foundation seeks to provide a meaningful financial award that encourages future work and to broaden recognition of the recipients by publishing a catalog highlighting their careers.
Flintridge Foundation’s open application process typically attracts a large number of submissions–904 artists applied for the 2003/2004 Awards–639 from California, 265 from Oregon/Washington. Two separate panels of artists and art professionals selected the recipients from each region after examining submission materials that included slides documenting each applicant’s minimum 20-year body of work. For jurors, this translated into a 3-5 day commitment in which they reviewed many thousands of slides.
A celebration honoring the recipients will be held Saturday, July 31, 2004 in La Conner, WA, at the Museum of Northwest Art.