Astraea Awards Visual Artists
Astraea named Lydia Conklin, Erin Forrest and Maia Palileo awardees of the 2009 Astraea Visual Arts Fund. The Fund was founded in 2002 to promote the work of contemporary lesbian visual artists who show artistic merit and share Astraea's commitment to visibility and social justice feminism.
Each year, three grants of $2,500 are awarded to artists working in an array of media including sculpture, painting, prints, mixed media and works on paper. Two grants are supported by an endowed gift from founding mother and artist Joan Watts. A third grant is made possible by Skip's Sappho Fund, established at Astraea by a bequest from Skip Neal, a lesbian artist who enjoyed a successful career in museum exhibition.
The awards are determined by a distinguished panel of artists and art professionals. This year's panel included Elaine Gan, Dani Leventhal, Flavia Rando and Mickalene Thomas.
Lydia Conklin | New York, NY
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Lydia is a cartoonist, artist and writer. She specializes in comics about children and the societies they form around each other, as well as the deep sense of mystery and awe between children and animals. Her work has appeared in The American Drivel Review, Beeswax Magazine, Carousel Magazine, Coal City Review, Hobart, Monkey Bicycle, Narrative Magazine, and Sundays Comics Anthology. Comics Journal named her comic one of the best of 2008. She has shown her drawings and paintings in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Cambridge and Philadelphia. Lydia plans to use the grant to complete her graphic novel, Camp Interesting, and embark on her next project about a transgender child transitioning in middle school. www.Lydiaconklin.com
Erin Forrest | Albuquerque, NM
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Erin is an interdisciplinary artist originally from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work explores intersections of trauma, healing, sexuality and collectivity. It deals with everyday struggles to find recognition, intimacy, protection or wholeness. Her work examines the things we do to look after ourselves and one another. Erin has participated in numerous exhibitions and is included in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art’s Feminist Art Base. She received a BFA from California College of the Arts and an MFA from the University of New Mexico. Currently, she works as an artist/advocate with ArtStreet, a community art center at Albuquerque Health Care for the Homeless. www.erinforrest.com
Maia Palileo | Brooklyn, NY
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Through installation, sculpture, and painting, Maia consciously revisits personal history to isolate fear, uncertainty, love and loss. After her mother’s sudden death, she immersed herself in family photos and memories. She describes her work as “one big family portrait that focuses on the complicated duality of family life as safe and unsafe.” Her work has been featured in Contemporary Art Philippines. She has received the Joseph Skinner Fellowship in Art and a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant. Born in Chicago, Maia is a first generation Filipino-American. She holds a BA in Studio Art from Mount Holyoke College and a MFA in Sculpture from Brooklyn College. Currently, Maia is an artist-teacher for the Joan Mitchell Foundation. http://maiapalileo.com
Honorable Mention: Carmen McLeod | Brooklyn, NY
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Carmen’s work is drawn from the lexicons of painting, popular photography and the news media. She is currently developing her painting to more completely reflect her experience as an individual in contemporary society. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco and Caren Golden Fine Art in New York. Born in Phoenix, Arizona, Carmen earned a BFA from California College of Art and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. www.carmenmcleod.com
Visual Art Fund 2009 Panelists
Born and raised in Manila, Philippines, Elaine Gan works primarily in the public domain and seeks to reconfigure urban spaces, social roles, and popular images. Her work exposes institutionalized networks of hierarchy and privilege that bind certain people together as much as discriminate violently (often invisibly) against others. Elaine holds a B. A. in Architecture from Wellesley College in Massachusetts and recently participated in the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has received awards, grants, and support from organizations that include the New York Foundation for the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Amnesty International/Firefly Project, and NY Department of Cultural Affairs. Elaine's work has been exhibited at venues including The Soap Factory in Minneapolis, Exit Art, Artists Space, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Socrates Sculpture Park, Islip Art Museum, and P. S. 122. Elaine is a past awardee of the Astraea Visual Arts Fund. www.ganstudio.com
Dani Leventhal is a drawer, sculptor and video artist who investigates socio-political material ranging from homosexual identity and class, to immigration and racism. Her videos are distributed through the Video Data Bank and V-Tape. Her video Draft 9 received the Directors Choice Award at the International Festival of Documentary Films in Jihlava, Czech Republic in 2005. In 2007 she received an Astraea Visual Arts Award and a Women's Studio Workshop Book Arts Grant to produce a piece about the conflict in Palestine/Israel. She earned her MFA at the University of Illinois, Chicago in 2003 and is now pursuing an MFA in film at Bard College. Born in Columbus, Ohio, she lives and works in Rosendale, New York. Dani is a past awardee of the Astraea Visual Arts Fund. www.danileventhal.com
Flavia Rando is an art historian who teaches in the Women's Studies Program at Brooklyn College, the City University of New York. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History and Women's Studies from Rutgers University and has taught at Rutgers University, Purdue University, and the University of New Mexico. A Lesbian (art) activist since 1969, she was a member of the Gay Liberation Front and Radicalesbians. She has been co-chair of the Queer Caucus of the College Art Association, is a founding member of the Astraea Visual Arts Committee, and has initiated the Project for LGBT Undergraduates at CUNY. She is the co-editor of the Special Issue of the Art Journal: Gay and Lesbian Presence in Art and Art History and has lectured and published widely on contemporary art and queer, feminist, and ethnic identifications.
Mickalene Thomas is best known for her elaborate paintings composed of rhinestones, enamel and acrylic paint. Her depictions of African American women embody alternate notions of black female identity while exploring romanticized ideals of femininity, celebrity and sexuality. Thomas stages her figures amid a riot of pattern and color, creating a scene evocative of the Blaxploitation films and wood-paneled rec rooms of her 1970’s childhood. Thomas earned her MFA from Yale University in 2002 and, in 2002-2003, participated in the Artist-in-Residence program at the Studio Museum in Harlem. She has exhibited extensively and was included in the recent and critically acclaimed exhibitions 30 Americans at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, FL; Black Is, Black Ain’t at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, IL; and Greater New York 2005 at PS1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, NY. Her work may also be seen in prestigious public collections such as the Brooklyn Museum; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C.; and the Art Institute of Chicago among others. She is represented by Lehmann Maupin in New York, Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago and Susanne Vielmetter Projects in Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in various catalogues and reviewed in ArtForum, Art in America, The New York Times, The New Yorker, NY Arts, Modern Painters, Whitewall, and Frieze among others. www.mickalenethomas.com
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