Pratt Announces Scholarship and Award Recipients!
07/17/2019
Pratt Fine Arts Center Announces Scholarship and Awards Recipients
SEATTLE, WASH – Pratt Fine Arts Center announced today the names of its 2019-20 Scholarship and Awards recipients. The awards provide educational and studio access opportunities for artists working in a variety of artistic disciplines and at many different career levels. “Pratt’s mission is to make art accessible to all,” said Steve Galatro, Pratt Fine Arts Center’s Executive Director. “By offering these scholarships and awards, we are proud to provide full access to our studios and classes to artists at all levels, as they continue to make strides in their own artistic careers and in Seattle’s rich art community”.
Pratt Fine Arts Center’s 2019-20 Scholarship and Awards recipients are:
ArtBridge Fellowship: Ling Chun
In partnership with Chihuly Garden and Glass and METHOD Gallery, the ArtBridge Fellowship fosters the creation and exhibition of new work from a promising talent, and equips that artist with the tools to advance to the next level in his/her professional journey. The Fellowship culminates with a solo exhibition at METHOD Gallery. Ling Chun is a Hong Kong-born female ceramic artist who likes playing with hair. A beauty school dropout with a lust and a greed for color, she introduces hair into her ceramics instead of styling it on a head. Ultimately, she aims to explore how ceramics are more than just clay. Ling intends to create a series of large scale art lighting installations involved with a personal experiment with color shifting glaze.
The Bernie Funk Artist Explorations Scholarship: Hanako O’Leary
This scholarship is awarded on an annual basis for an adult who identifies as an artist working in two-dimensional or three-dimensional media, excluding glass. The scholarship will include classes in the metal, wood, stone, drawing, painting, or printmaking studios, a membership to Pratt, studio access, a supply stipend, and include professional development opportunities. Hanako O’Leary is a sculptor working predominantly in clay. Born and raised by her Japanese mother and American father, Hanako spent most of her life on American soil, but always under Japanese matriarchy, attending an annual two month summer pilgrimage to her ancestral home in Hiroshima, Japan until the age of 18. She learned to bridge these identities through art, employing traditional Japanese imagery to narrate her current American story.
Edwin T. Pratt Scholarship: Elizabeth Seibel, Gabriel Diaz, & Leleita McKill
The Edwin T. Pratt Scholarship aims to amplify the work of underrepresented artists of color and equip them with education and tools that will help them progress to the next level in their professional journeys. Elizabeth Seibel plans to work on a project that began months ago after developing a series of self-portraits. This started as an exploration of her body and size, an expression and exertion of sexuality, her queerness and a desire to see herself in the art that exists in the world. There is a huge lack of representation in both screenprinting and blockprinting mediums of fat queer folks. As a queer fat femme (a queer gender identity that embraces and embodies the feminine) Elizabeth chooses to center and celebrate those bodies and experiences in her work. Gabriel Diaz has recently decided to include a historical journey of understanding Taíno Culture into his art. As a Puerto Rican artist he was interested in developing a story to focus his art in a direction. His overall goal is to have an exhibition called Ancestral Future: A Vision of Taíno that will explore works of art that combine traditional techniques married with digital technology. The exhibition will showcase art developed within the program to create a multimedia experience including: carvings, paintings and fashion. Leleita McKill is a visual artist who wants to expand her work in photography into mixed media work. As a woman of color working in the medium of photography, Leleita is especially sensitive to exploring the themes of diversity and representation as it pertains to individuals, community, cultures, textures, shapes and the environment. She is a storyteller that prefers to use imagery to tell stories and believes exploring techniques in printing, painting and proper use of acrylics for transferring images and collaging techniques will illuminate the path towards the realization of some of her ideas.
This scholarship is awarded on an annual basis for an adult who identifies as an artist working in two-dimensional or three-dimensional media, excluding glass. The scholarship will include classes in the metal, wood, stone, drawing, painting, or printmaking studios, a membership to Pratt, studio access, a supply stipend, and include professional development opportunities. Hanako O’Leary is a sculptor working predominantly in clay. Born and raised by her Japanese mother and American father, Hanako spent most of her life on American soil, but always under Japanese matriarchy, attending an annual two month summer pilgrimage to her ancestral home in Hiroshima, Japan until the age of 18. She learned to bridge these identities through art, employing traditional Japanese imagery to narrate her current American story.
Edwin T. Pratt Scholarship: Elizabeth Seibel, Gabriel Diaz, & Leleita McKill
The Edwin T. Pratt Scholarship aims to amplify the work of underrepresented artists of color and equip them with education and tools that will help them progress to the next level in their professional journeys. Elizabeth Seibel plans to work on a project that began months ago after developing a series of self-portraits. This started as an exploration of her body and size, an expression and exertion of sexuality, her queerness and a desire to see herself in the art that exists in the world. There is a huge lack of representation in both screenprinting and blockprinting mediums of fat queer folks. As a queer fat femme (a queer gender identity that embraces and embodies the feminine) Elizabeth chooses to center and celebrate those bodies and experiences in her work. Gabriel Diaz has recently decided to include a historical journey of understanding Taíno Culture into his art. As a Puerto Rican artist he was interested in developing a story to focus his art in a direction. His overall goal is to have an exhibition called Ancestral Future: A Vision of Taíno that will explore works of art that combine traditional techniques married with digital technology. The exhibition will showcase art developed within the program to create a multimedia experience including: carvings, paintings and fashion. Leleita McKill is a visual artist who wants to expand her work in photography into mixed media work. As a woman of color working in the medium of photography, Leleita is especially sensitive to exploring the themes of diversity and representation as it pertains to individuals, community, cultures, textures, shapes and the environment. She is a storyteller that prefers to use imagery to tell stories and believes exploring techniques in printing, painting and proper use of acrylics for transferring images and collaging techniques will illuminate the path towards the realization of some of her ideas.
Jon and Mary Shirley Scholarship in Glass: Lydia Boss, Brandyn Callahan
Generously funded by the Jon & Mary Shirley Foundation, this scholarship is awarded to emerging artists who wish to pursue new or experimental directions in glass art. Lydia Boss is thrilled to dedicate more time to making her work and further developing her unique, feminine perspective. She is interested in working within a narrow set of guidelines to develop works that distort, blur, and collage imagery either through or within layers of glass. Lydia is designing a series of glass mirrors that bend light through transparent vinyl and natural imagery that is applied to the mirror’s surface. By using blown glass as the surface for the curved mirror, viewers will be able to see hidden imagery within a two dimensional composition through this 16th Century technique. Brandyn Callahan’s passion for glass led him to move to Seattle in 2012 and since then he has felt fortunate to be included in a talented community of glass makers. In pursuing knowledge about glass, he has cultivated a keen interest in how glass can interact with other materials. Copper, being a pliable metal, can deform during the cooling process allowing it to be added to glass in the hot shop or flame working studio. Brandyn is interested in utilizing these resources to learn more about traditional copper working techniques.
Mary and Gary Molyneaux Scholarship for Womxn (50 and Over): Bean Fairbanks
Through the generous support of Mary and Gary Molyneaux, Pratt is pleased to offer a new scholarship supporting the continued creative advancement of established womxn artists, 50 years of age or over. This scholarship is designed to provide opportunities for an artist to explore new medium or disciplines. Bean Fairbanks started working on art as physical, cognitive and mental health therapy and wants to share that with others. She has an online art journal of her journey and hopes that it encourages others to join her in her therapeutic art journey. Being an older woman, Bean often feels invisible in this youth-oriented world but that feeling of invisibility is pervasive in the disabled community. Although there are several extremely talented disabled artists, she asks, how often do you see disabled art students?
Pratt/Seattle Print Arts Partners Grant: Lynn Rosskamp
Offered in partnership with Seattle Print Arts (SPA), the Pratt/SPA Partners Grant provides opportunity for a printmaker who aims to refine skills or pursue new directions in the discipline. Lynn Rosskamp considers herself an urban naturalist and her current imagery deals with the wild inside the city: plants and animals that even someone who rarely leaves the city limits might have opportunity to observe or interact with. She would like to continue her exploration into making modular etchings: using smaller plates that fit together to create larger works of almost infinite size or configuration. Lynn is very interested in the history of place and has plans to explore some of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest’s past with a multi-plate series of prints on the vanishing city of even the last couple of decades.
Pratt/ Seattle Metals Guild Partners Grant: Arik Espineli
Offered in partnership with Seattle Metals Guild (SMG), the Pratt/SMG Partners Grant is designed to support a metal artist who aims to refine skills or pursue new directions in the discipline. Arik Espineli was encouraged to take the metal studio class at Seattle Pacific University a year ago. At the time he was a mechanical engineering major, and had always enjoyed working with his hands and creating things. For his engineering courses, he was creating a lot of designs, and even fabricating many projects, but never thought about using metal to create art with his design instincts. After the first class session with Virginia Causey, Arik fell in love with metalworking.
ABOUT PRATT Pratt Fine Arts Center offers classes for all skill levels and abilities. It is the only facility in the Northwest where absolute beginners and established professional artists work side-by-side creating art in glass, sculpture, jewelry and metalsmithing, painting, drawing and printmaking. Pratt provides affordable studios with unparalleled state-of-the-art equipment and professional artist instruction to create an environment where students learn and create. ###
Pratt/ Seattle Metals Guild Partners Grant: Arik Espineli
Offered in partnership with Seattle Metals Guild (SMG), the Pratt/SMG Partners Grant is designed to support a metal artist who aims to refine skills or pursue new directions in the discipline. Arik Espineli was encouraged to take the metal studio class at Seattle Pacific University a year ago. At the time he was a mechanical engineering major, and had always enjoyed working with his hands and creating things. For his engineering courses, he was creating a lot of designs, and even fabricating many projects, but never thought about using metal to create art with his design instincts. After the first class session with Virginia Causey, Arik fell in love with metalworking.
ABOUT PRATT Pratt Fine Arts Center offers classes for all skill levels and abilities. It is the only facility in the Northwest where absolute beginners and established professional artists work side-by-side creating art in glass, sculpture, jewelry and metalsmithing, painting, drawing and printmaking. Pratt provides affordable studios with unparalleled state-of-the-art equipment and professional artist instruction to create an environment where students learn and create. ###