The Trawick Prize: Bethesda Contemporary Art Awards is a visual art prize produced by the Bethesda Arts and Entertainment
District (through the spectacular generosity of Ms. Carol Trawick) that honors artists from Maryland, Washington, D.C. and
Virginia. The annual juried competition awards $14,000 in prize monies
to selected artists and features the work of the finalists in a group
exhibition. The 2012 finalists and their bios are at the end of this posting.
The 2012 exhibition will be held September 1-29 at Gallery B, located at 7700 Wisconsin Avenue, Suite E, Bethesda, MD 20814 (the former space of the Fraser Gallery). Winners will be announced September 5.
The finalists were selected by:
Dawn Gavin
Dawn Gavin was born in Bellshill, Scotland, and currently lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. She has received a Bachelor of Arts (First Class) in Drawing and Painting, a Master of Fine Art and a Master of Science degree in Electronic Imaging from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee, Scotland. Her work investigates issues of identity and displacement, employing a range of media from collage and installed drawings to digital video. She has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, The John Michael Kohler Art Centre (Sheboygen, MI), Maryland Institute College of Art, Meyerhoff Gallery (Baltimore, MD), The DCA Visual Research Centre (Dundee, Scotland), The Philadelphia Art Alliance and The Washington Project for the Arts (Washington D.C.). She is an Associate Professor in Drawing and Foundations at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Barbara Kelly Gordon
Barbara Kelly Gordon is an Associate Curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian where she focuses on contemporary international art, and especially film, video and new media. She has worked on major exhibitions ranging from a retrospective of Douglas Gordon to Visual Music to The Cinema Effect, which completes a three-city tour of Spain in 2012. During the 2011-2012 season her exhibitions include Directions : Pipilotti Rist; Directions : Grazia Toderi; EMPIRE3 (with Andy Warhol); Directions: Antonio Rovaldi and Black Box shows with Hans Op de Beeck (Belgium), Larent Grasso (France), Nira Pereg (Israel), and Ali Kazma (Turkey). Gordon, who was born and raised in Washington D.C., has lectured widely on contemporary art and recently served on the jury for Emerging Italian Artists at the Strozzi Palace in Florence, Italy.
N. Elizabeth SchlatterMy picks from the finalists to win it all?: David D'Orio or Dean Kessman - both are intelligent conceptual artists who also have the rare talent to actually deliver a concrete and interesting product married to their conceptual ideas. However, usually the winner from any sort of allegedly objective art competition is determined by the biggest and most vociferous voice, and not personally knowing any of the three jurors, I don't know who's got the biggest mouth.
N. Elizabeth Schlatter is Deputy Director and Curator of Exhibitions at the University of Richmond Museums, Virginia, where she has curated more than 20 exhibitions, including recent exhibitions of art by Carl Chiarenza, Andreas Feininger, Hans Friedrich Grohs, Sue Johnson, and Fiona Ross, and the exhibitions “Art=Text=Art: Works by Contemporary Artists,” “LEADED: the Materiality and Metamorphosis of Graphite” and “Form & Story: Narration in Recent Painting.” Prior to working at the University of Richmond, she was an exhibitions project director for the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) in Washington, D.C. She has a bachelor’s degree in art history from Southwestern University in Texas, and a master’s in art history from George Washington University.
Another however: since five of the eight semifinalists come from the Baltimore area, I suspect that Scotland-born Dawn Gavin had the biggest and most vociferous voice over the two Sassenachs and the odds are (once again) stacked for a Baltimore-based artist to win the Trawick.
Who then? I'm betting Lillian Bayley Hoover, a brilliant and talented painter who now officially replaces Andrew Wodzianski as the "always the maid never the bride" of the major Bethesda Up! generous art prizes.