Oregon Arts Commission Awards Career Opportunity Grants to 10 Oregon Artists

Hibiki Miyazaki www.oregonartscommission.org

(PORTLAND, Ore.) - The Oregon Arts Commission announces 10 awards totaling $13,623 in the competitive Career Opportunity grant program. These awards provide support to individual artists who seek to take advantage of important opportunities to advance their careers through the development of artistic, business or professional skills. These may include exhibits in national and international venues, participation in conferences or workshops to expand their knowledge base.

Christine D'Arcy, the Arts Commission's executive director, observes "This investment in Oregon's artists helps stimulate creative activity throughout the state, and it's important to maintaining artists' creative small businesses. Many of the projects funded in this round will promote the work of Oregon artists around the world."

Grants were awarded to:

• Evertt A. Beidler, Portland, $1,500
  To support development of a multi-media installation, "The Devil is a Busy Man," at Portland Community College's (PCC) Sylvania North View Gallery in April 2010. Beidler, a part-time instructor at PCC, incorporates video, installation, sculpture, and performance into his installations. The show is planned to advance his teaching and exhibiting opportunities.
• Inge Bruggeman, Portland, $1,500
  To support participation in a two-month work/travel residency in Marseille, France that will allow her to continue work on an artist book inspired by early sea exploration in the 1700's. Bruggeman has been making and publishing fine press artists' books under her imprint INK-A! Press since 1992. She also owns and operates Textura which specializes in commission collaborations with artists, designers, publishers and individual letterpress enthusiasts.
• Helen Hiebert, Portland, $1,500
  To support travel for the exhibition of her critically acclaimed bookarts projects at the CODEX International Book Fair on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. The fair is acknowledged as the "world's fair" of the book as art and artifact. Hiebert has been adjunct faculty at Oregon College of Art & Craft, teaching papermaking since 2000.
• Ethan Jackson, Portland, $1,500
  To support Jackson's involvement in Light / Drift, an exhibit of experimental, site-specific interactions space at Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design outside Denver. RMCAD campus, a former sanatorium and medical research site, provides rich context for artists to explore themes of observation, transformation and physical change. Its Rotunda Pavilion will be transformed into a giant camera obscura that blankets the ceiling and floor with projected imagery from the outdoor surroundings. In that context, Jackson will present an interactive video installation that invites viewers to experiment with their own reflections as they move through the space.
• Diane Jacobs, Portland, $1,258
  To support Jacobs' attendance and exhibit of her one-of-a-kind books and broadsides at the CODEX International Book Fair on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. Intrigued by the complexities of human nature and the inevitable interconnectedness of all things, Jacobs uses human hair, text, found objects, ceramic, steel, glass, paper and reflective materials in her installations, book arts, prints, and sculptural work.
• Hibiki Miyazaki, Portland, $1,500
  To support participation in a residency at the Sanskriti Foundation in Delhi, India where Miyazaki will produce a body of large scale paintings on paper. Her prints depict fragments and scenes from stories that don't exist, allowing the viewer to create the characters and narratives. Miyazaki's influences include old movies and printed illustrations from the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, which have a dreamlike and naïve quality. The residency will allow her to expand her work with broader cross-cultural themes.
• Andrew Oliver, Portland, $1,010
  To support travel to New York City to study composition with noted jazz composer John Hollenbeck. A pianist and composer, Oliver studied jazz and performed as a bandleader and sideman in New Orleans from 2002 until 2005, when he returned to Portland following Katrina, and in 2007, he toured West and Central Africa with Devin Phillips and New Orleans Straight Ahead. The group was selected as one of ten jazz bands to travel the world as cultural ambassadors for the U.S. under the State Department and Jazz at Lincoln Center's "Rhythm Road: American Music Abroad" program.
• Marian Pierce, Portland, $1,500
  To support travel to the Japan Writers Conference at the Nihon University College of Art in Tokyo in early October, where Pierce will market her collection of short stories, following the publication of one of her stories by a Japanese literary magazine.
• Robin Stiehm, Jacksonville, $900
  To support attendance and participation in the Breitenbush Contact Improvisation Jam & Conference, allowing Stiehm, a contemporary dancer and choreographer, to gain more skills benefiting her company, Dancing People, in Southern Oregon.
• Elise Wagner, Portland, $1,455
  To support shipping costs and travel to East Coast for two exhibits of Wagner's work. . Best known for her deft handling of the ancient medium of encaustic—beeswax with pigment and resin—to create abstract paintings that combine scientific symbolism and the celestial, Wagner has been invited to present a survey exhibition of work spanning her career at Wilkes University's Sordoni Gallery in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. The show will open simultaneously with a solo exhibition of new work at Chase Gallery in Boston.

The next deadline for applications is November 15, 2010. Applications are available at www.oregonartscommission.org/support_for_the_arts/grants/grant_inds.php