Complex, which won $40,000; the 24th Street Theatre, which won $17,700 and the Santa Monica Museum of Art, which won $60,000. The 22 other organizations in the Los Angeles area won a combined $859,511. The organizations are located in communities throughout Los Angeles, including Long Beach, Venice, Beverly Hills, Pasadena, North Hollywood, Woodland Hills and Downtown Los Angeles.
The Visual Arts Initiative is designed to nurture and support the work of Los Angeles area artists and arts organizations while reflecting the diversity and richness of the many unique communities that make up the region, officials say.
“The community foundation is one of the few local supporters of Los Angeles artists and arts organizations,” said Antonia Hernández, president and CEO of the California Community Foundation. “We believe that art, and the experience of art, strengthens communities by transcending social, political and economic barriers in ways words cannot.”
After a peer-review process, eight mid-career artists and five emerging artists were chosen from a highly competitive pool of 200 applicants. Each winner was awarded a fellowship worth $15,000 by the California Community Foundation’s Visual Arts Initiative.
A juried panel of local artists, curators and academics in the arts selected this year’s individual artist winners. The community foundation defines a mid-career artist as an established artist who has seven or more years of active; professional participation in his or her field, and an emerging artist as having fewer than seven years of professional experience in his or her field.
Among the individual mid-career winners was painter Carol Caroompas, photographer Todd Gray, installer/painter Habib Kheradyar, film/video artist Susan Mogul, multimedia artist Susan Silton, artist Stas Orlovski, interdisciplinary artist Ruben Ortiz Torres, and sculptress and installation artist Carrie Ungerman. The emerging artists were Christopher Chinn, Susanna Maing, Desmond McVay, Artemio Rodriguez, and Haruko Tanaka.
The California Community Foundation has given away more than $555,000 in the last four years to emerging and mid-career artists, and close to $2.8 million to visual arts organizations and small theater companies.
Funds for the California Community Foundation’s Visual Arts Initiative are provided by the J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts, the Brody Arts Fund and other foundation funds.
For a complete list of artists, arts organizations and panelists, as well as links to the winners’ Web sites, visit the California Community Foundation’s Web site at www.calfund.org
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 18, 2005. Read the original PDF.