THE TRAWICK PRIZE
20 YEARS OF SUPPORTING

EMERALD AWARD CELEBRATING 20 YEARS OF SUPPORTING REGIONAL ARTISTS
February 4 – March 19, 2023
American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center
Washington, D.C.

February 4 – March 19, 2023
American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center
Washington, D.C.
The Trawick Prize for Contemporary Arts is a coveted visual arts prize that honors artists from Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Virginia in an annual juried competition. It is one of the first competitions to award substantial prizes and increased visibility to selected artists of our region. Now in its 20th year, the prize was established by community activist and philanthropist Carol Trawick in 2002. To date, The Trawick Prize has awarded over $300,00 to local contemporary artists and has exhibited the work of more than 200 artists who reached the level of finalists in each year’s competition.
This exhibition presents the work of artists who were awarded the “Best in Show” in the Trawick competition over the last 20 years. This year, we will select The Trawick Prize Emerald Award— the best of the best! The American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center chose to collaborate with The Trawick Prize for Contemporary Arts because it supports and celebrates the artists of our region and employs a professional jurying process. It is not so much about the winner of the competition as it is about the depth and breadth of our artistic talent and the
Mia Feuer, Solar Mothers (Melissa, lost woman), 2019. Plaster, paper mache, rocks, styrofoam, polyurethane foam, pigments, ceramic mosaic, 50 gallon oil drum, 6.5 x 5 x 4 ft. Courtesy of the artist.
diversity in technique, content, and style to be found here. This coincides nicely with the mission of the American University Museum.
I want to thank the participating artists: WonJung Choi, Lauren Adams, Larry Cook, Oletha DeVane, Neil Feather, Mia Feuer, Caroline Hatfield, Lillian Bayley Hoover, Gary Kachadourian, Cecelia Kim, Maggie Michael, Jonathan Monaghan, David Page, James Rieck, Jo Smail, and Wickerham & Lomax. And, of course, I must thank Carol Trawick, the force behind The Trawick Prize and this exhibition. She is a long-time community activist on behalf of the arts, serving as the past chair for the Bethesda Arts & Entertainment District, the Bethesda Urban Partnership, and the Maryland State Arts Council. She founded the Bethesda Painting Awards and, in 2007, she founded the Jim and Carol Trawick Foundation to assist the Department of Health and Human Services and arts nonprofits in Montgomery County. Carol Trawick is a model for all who are interested in meaningful engagement with the creative life of our communities.
Arts Center Washington, DC
“My sculptures integrate ceramic—which is the primary medium—with wood, fresh water pearls, semi-precious stones, gold leaf and oil paint. They are made complete with secret compartments which serve as hiding places for multiple and often times personal meanings. My recent work is based on narratives drawn from personal and historical events that are overlapped with subconscious images. The figures are like actors on a stage, enigmatic yet tense while enveloped or encrusted within layers of overgrowth concealing a world within.”
Richard Cleaver has been working in sculpture for 45 years. He received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and MA from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. The artist has exhibited nationally, including solo exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art, American University Museum, Kohler Arts Center, the Noyes Museum, the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery (New York and Miami) and Franz Bader Gallery. Group exhibitions include Peabody Essex Museum, International Sculpture Center, Arizona State Museum, Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Erie Art Museum and Corcoran Gallery of Art.
His work is in the collections of the Crocker Art Museum, George and Dorothy Saxe Collection at the DeYoung Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, Diane and Sandy Besser Collection at Arizona State Museum, Fuller Craft Museum and the Delaware Art Museum. In addition to receiving the Trawick Prize in 2003, Clever has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Evergreen Foundation, Maryland State Arts Council, the Franz and Virginia Bader Fund, and the Baker Artist Award.
“I imagine an immense structure with a vast interior space, a cathedral, a train station, or a palace. The structure is scaffolded and buttressed by brutality and cruelty but skinned with a genteel decorative interior.
Those who exist comfortably in the middle may marvel at and be distracted by its ornamental membrane, held aloft by the decorous euphemisms of respectability, tradition, good order, adherence to law, family values, and taste, whereas those closer to the edges experience and endure it harsh and brutal structure, see the same as social control, extraction, war and state capitalism, exploitation, the remnants of slavery and segregation, racism excessive policing, punishment, and fear.
My building is an allegory but it is not fanciful. The institutions within which we operate, learn, teach, curate, and exhibit were often bestowed upon or purchased with the tassels and fringes of the wealth of industrialists who use these very institutions to wash and beatify their reputations, pronouncing them philanthropists as opposed to the profiteers, exploiters, and enslavers that critical view of history reveals.
Artists, I believe, live both on the edges and in the comfortable center. It is our job to pull back the scrim and reveal the structure.
David Page is an artist who tries to explain intersecting notions around labor, power imbalances, threat, risk, and everyday brutality. Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Page earned a National Diploma in Fine Arts from the Cape Tecnikon in 1986 and received an MFA from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2002.
Solo shows include Security Theatre at the Creative Alliance (Baltimore), “God and Lunchmeat” at Old Dominion University, and “Staan Nader, Staan Terug!” Translation: come closer, get away!) at Stevenson University. He was awarded the Mary Sawyers Baker Prize for Visual Arts in 2019, received the Maryland State Arts Council’s Individual Artist Award in 1996, 2007, 2009, 2012, and 2014, won The Trawick Prize in 2004. He also won the University of Maryland’s Art for Peace Award in 2001 which included the commission of a small sculptural object which was presented to Nelson Mandela upon his visit to the university.
Mr. Page teaches at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at George Washington University and the American University, where he is Sculptor in Residence. He lives in Baltimore with his wife, jewelry designer Lauren Schott, and Hank the dog.
“My images are cultural landscapes that both look familiar and odd at the same time. I am a cartographer of cultures and an icon maker in my lucid worlds. I am taking cues from wide ranges of history of Eastern and Western art, colors and designs from popular culture, Korean temple paintings and folk art, internet emoticons and icons, fruit stickers and labels of products from all over the place. I tease and change these lexicons so that they are hard to identify, yet stay in a familiar zone. This is a super-fascinating process for me. I have realized that blending cultures and making hybrid images is to be almost against people’s natural impulse to try to identify and categorize things in this world. I am purposefully making images that are hard to identify where they originate.
The world is so interconnected nowadays, how can you even tell where someone or something “comes from” anymore? The seemingly simple question “where are you from?” can be tricky to answer these days. I am beginning to realize more and more that identity, as a concept linked to geographic location, tends to shift and overlap. This strongly affects the imagery of my work.
I want my mark making to be loaded with multiple meanings. I try to camouflage all things and people to reveal hidden truths that lie beneath the surface of what we see. The subject is serious, and my process is highly labor-intensive, but this is not the impression I am trying to convey to my viewers. I want my works to appear to be lighthearted, breezy and funny. Yet, beneath the surface, they are teeming with ideas, full of old and new, fast and slow, spontaneous and deliberate. I want my work to symbolize the diversity and identity of the various worlds we live in. I want to be a visual interpreter of the mixed-cultural world of my generation.”
Jiha Moon (b. 1973) is from DaeGu, Korea and lives and works in Atlanta, GA. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa, Iowa City. Her work is in the collection of the Asia Society, New York, NY; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; The Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC; Smithsonian Institute, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro, NC; and The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA. She received the Trawick Prize in 2005.
Moon’s solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, GA; Taubman Museum, Roanoke, VA; the Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC; The Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville, TN; Rhodes College, Clough-Hanson Gallery, Memphis, TN; and James Gallery of CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY. Group exhibitions include the Kemper Museum, Kansas City, MI; the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA; the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA; Asia Society, New York, NY; The Drawing Center, New York, NY; White Columns, New York, NY; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; and the Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro, NC.
Her mid-career survey exhibition organized by Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art and Taubman Museum is touring the country until 2018.
“Culling together figures and backgrounds, my paintings are derived from advertisements and promotional materials, vintage department store catalogs, and year-end corporate reports. By cropping the subject’s eyes or face, I redirect the viewer’s gaze to the model’s body language to make sense of their unspoken expressions. Accustomed to suspending our disbelief of a model’s charm, we know they’re posing, but without their reassuring eyes, models’ bodies convey unconscious and hidden feelings. Just as there can be a big difference between what happens on the outside of our body, and what happens inside of our heads, a model’s clothes and gestures are much like the paint on my canvases; they reflect or hide the invisible parts. The visible parts—the painted things—become the primary focus, but the unseen parts of the paintings, the parts not painted, parts of the picture cropped out, or even parts of the picture plane removed, creating shaped canvases or canvas with a hole in them, become just as important as what is included inside the frame.
James Rieck was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1965. He earned a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from the Mount Royal School of Art. He also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland.
Rieck’s paintings have been exhibited across the United States. Museum and group shows include, “We Could Be Heroes: The Mythology of Monsters and Heroes in Contemporary Art” at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah; “Size Does Matter” curated by Shaquille O’Neal, the Flag Foundation, New York; “As Others See Us: The Contemporary Portrait,” Brattleboro Museum, Vermont; “The Seasons,” Nassau County Museum; “Baltimore Liste,” The Contemporary Museum, Baltimore Maryland; and at the Corcoran Museum, Washington, D.C.
His work is present in the West Collection, Pennsylvania; the Burger Collection; the BollagRothschild Collection, Switzerland; and the Chadha Collection, The Netherlands, among others. In 2006, Rieck won the prestigious Trawick Prize. James Rieck is currently based in Joshua Tree, California.
I want to make magic to surprise conjuring something new perhaps ridiculous unexpected unpredictable Rhythms sam rhymes with ham silly absurd tainted by memories of childhood but made in the present layers of love
I want to make magic tortoises circulated with honey cakes balanced on their backs… Why Stay here when I could be there?
South African artist Jo Smail moved to Baltimore in 1985 and taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art from 1988 – 2017 where she is now professor emeritus of fine art. Smail’s work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, The Hudson Review, the Baltimore Sun, The Washington Post, and most recently BmoreArt. She has been the recipient of numerous accolades and residencies including, winner of the Trawick Sapphire award, Maryland State Arts Council awards, Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellowship, the Rochefort-enTerre Residency in France, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant.
Smail is represented in private and public collections including Baltimore Museum of Art; US Embassy, Johannesburg; Johannesburg Art Museum; Johns Hopkins University Collection; Mobil Corporation Art Collection; and National Gallery of South Africa.
In 2020, she had her first retrospective exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art. She was recently included in “Fields and Formations: A Survey of Mid-Atlantic Abstraction” of female artists at the Delaware Contemporary and the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, D.C.
“My paintings are set to their moment and sourced from an observant process of creating and translating conglomerates of meaning. I connect what I see happening on the ground in my studio to the nearby, outside world. Many of my works are reactions to news, histories, and personal life relationships. Some paintings are visceral and surreal propositions for new intersections—my imagined “what ifs” from histories and futures. I prepare for and think about what is possible by creating, observing, and making decisions that lead to what becomes. What can be done is endlessly different than deciding when something is done. I usually work on two or three paintings at a time as this creates a further conversation between works partnered in time—a sisterhood of sorts. I continue to circle back to the words of Clarice Lispector and her particular voice; a sentence from Agua Viva, “more than the instant, I want its flow” carries time and transcendence. In my studio, myriad tones, marks, lines, and forms coalesce on canvas and paper, urging me to listen as one does to language.”
Maggie Michael (born, Milwaukee, Wisconsin) lives and works in Washington, D.C. Her work has been exhibited across the U.S. and internationally. Recent exhibitions include, “Fields and Formations: A Survey of Mid-Atlantic Abstraction,” the Delaware Contemporary, Delaware (2021) and the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, Washington, D.C. (2022), “One on One: Maggie Michael/Arthur Dove, Depth of Field,” the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (2019). Museum and public collections include the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; National Museum of Women in the Arts; Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Phillips Collection; U.S. Art in Embassies Collection in Romania and Barbados. Artist residencies and awards include the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Banff, Canada; Cetate Arts Danube, Romania; the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, the Trawick Contemporary Art Award, and artist fellowship grants from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, funded in part by the NEA.
“In 2019, curator Shirley Watts, based in Alameda, California, approached me with an opportunity to create an installation inside a decommissioned greenhouse at the Los Angeles County Arboretum. This derelict structure made of wood and glass was formerly used to conduct smog experiments in the 1960s and has been sitting vacant for years. Solar Mothers, a sculptural installation consisting of ten figurative sculptural pieces was inspired by this space. During the creation of this body of work, my best friend, Joan Keenan, a midwife who served the most marginalized populations of women in the North end of Winnipeg, was dying of lung and brain cancer. Joan’s body, along with nine other miraculous women’s bodies were cast in plaster and transformed into sculptures that referenced the Egyptian Goddess Tawaret. With the head of a hippo, the body of a woman, and the tail of a serpent, these Goddesses were tasked with protecting and caring for all birthing mothers and newborn babies of all species. They also were tasked with delivering the sun over the horizon each morning. The tails on these sculptures not only reference the serpentine tail of Tawaret but also reference the 2011 paleontological finding of a fully mummified Nodosaur fossil found in the Suncor Energy strip mines in Northern Alberta. Solar Mothers (Melissa, Lost Woman) tells the story of my cousin Melissa who was estranged from her indigenous father and ancestral lineage for the first 22 years of her life due to deeply troubling and racist, anti-indigenous beliefs held by members of the Jewish community in Winnipeg. Joan Keenan left Earth in October of 2020, and this series is dedicated to her.”
Mia Feuer was born on Ojibwe, Cree and Métis land—colonially known as Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada in 1981—to a working-class Jewish family. She is the great-great-granddaughter of Ukrainianborn Rabbi Abraham Feuer, who left Flatbush, New York in 1901 to initiate a Jewish Farm Colony in the frozen prairies of rural Saskatchewan. Her sculptural practice can be described as one that is committed to exploring questions relating to activism, social and environmental justice, storytelling, mythologies, and research that span over two decades. Through the manipulation of mixed media, found objects, mold making, and constructing and deconstructing materials, her work examines relationships between synthetic materials, bodies, cultural oppressions, spiritual proximities, weather systems, grief, and timelines. Her work often employs specific Northern cultural signifiers within the context of colonialism, internalized antisemitism, and misogyny. Mia Feuer is currently living on Ohlone Land, colonially known as Oakland, California where she is an associate professor of sculpture at California College of the Arts. She is the mother of six-year-old Galileo, and she tends goal for the Northern California Women’s Hockey League.
“These paintings begin as encounters in landscapes, particularly those marked by geological “deep time.” They bear witness to human interventions in the landscape and to our interactions with the non-human world. Such interventions reify systems of control and speak to notions of access—specifically, who has access to the physical, emotional, and spiritual gifts of nature. Portions of the picture plane seem to be torn away or excised, revealing flat passages of chromatic grays, blacks, and browns. These interruptions and barriers prevent the viewer from fully entering or navigating the space. Competing visual languages and surfaces reflect our experience of the land we inhabit, our interactions with what is considered “wild,” and the varying degrees to which our encounters with nature are mediated. Given the rift between human and non-human worlds, how should we proceed? How might we live well within these disrupted spaces? Part meditation, part metaphor, part elegy, these landscapes explore the anxiety, despair, terror, and joy which characterize our shared precarity.”.
Lillian Hoover’s work appears in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, Weatherspoon Museum, and the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Recent solo exhibitions include “Presence In Absence” at Goya Contemporary (2021) and “In This World” at BlackRock Center for the Arts (2018). In 2020, Hoover received a PollockKrasner grant. She has been awarded fellowships to attend residencies at I-Park, Vermont Studio Center, Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program for Artists, Monson Arts Center, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
“I consider myself to be an engraver/printer: I make copies of photographs for small books. Sometimes these copies are of photographs that I’ve taken, sometimes they are from secondary sources such as catalogs, and sometimes they are copies I make of artists’ photographs or video stills that have been made in interaction with those artists.
“My work for decades has involved time, music, and physics on a human scale. In this body of work, balls of various sizes and kinds are used in eccentric physics experiments. These unlikely situations are created by mechanical sculptures that have regular but chaotic movements. The most interesting and beautiful video footage of these “chaos engines” was used to make movies conceived as musical compositions.
Physical objects within chaotic systems create a mechanical psychedelia that affects muscle memory and balance as well as visual perception. Hypnotic fascination, satisfaction, and surprise reveal the beauty of physics. Humor and precarity are also included as they are in life.
This body of work has been developed in tandem with site-specific kinetic sound installations, improvised music performances, and collaboration with other musicians.
The changes in my circumstances created limitations prompting new contraptions, forms, and ways of working. While part of this change has been working more digitally, for instance my entry into this exhibition, I remain a zealot for the corporeal experience.”
Neil Feather is internationally known as an inventor of experimental musical instruments. The instruments combine strings, springs, magnets, motors, flywheels, electromagnetic pickups, bicycles, bowling balls, and other matter to explore the sounds of unlikely physical events. He has performed hundreds of concerts across the United States, Canada, and New Zealand. He has created numerous site-specific sound installations.
Neil Feather has been a key player in Baltimore Maryland’s vibrant music and art community since 1985. He was a founding member of the Red Room Collective and the High Zero Foundation, a group committed to the presentation of experimental and improvised music.
He won the 2014 Sondheim Art Prize and the 2014 Trawick Prize. He was included in a major exhibition “Art or Sound” in the 2014 Venice Biennale, and he is a 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow.
Neil moved to New Zealand in 2020 and now lives in West Auckland. He is a member of the bands Outer Space Food Fight with Rosie Langabeer and Status Seekers with Jeff Henderson. He recently had a show at the Audio Foundation in Auckland called “Wormholes, Vortices and Loops” featuring drawings and a video installation.
“My computer-animated video installations construct dreamlike narratives that allude to the dehumanizing effects of technology and consumerism. I draw from a wide range of sources including ancient mythologies, commercial architecture, and corporate logos to imagine a mythical world where the boundaries between the natural and man-made are subverted in fantastical and sometimes humorous ways. The imagery and themes in my video installations also inform the rest of my multidisciplinary body of work, reappearing in my prints and sculptures, among other mediums.
My works appropriate the sleek, computer-generated techniques and aesthetics found in video games, advertisements, and real estate renderings. This provides my audience with a familiar framework but recast through my critical reflections on the digital landscape, the works also elicit deep-seated anxieties about the future.
Jonathan Monaghan is an artist working across a range of media—including prints, sculpture, and computer-animated video—to produce otherworldly objects and narratives. Drawing on wide-ranging sources, such as historical artworks and science fiction, his fantastical pieces uncover subconscious anxieties associated with technology and consumerism. Past exhibitions include the Sundance Film Festival, the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. His work has been featured in several media outlets including The New York Times, Vogue, The Washington Post, and the Village Voice. His work sits in numerous public and private collections including the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Washington D.C. Art Bank Collection.
“My upbringing on a pig farm in the rural American south has been a catalyst for exploring issues of labor and class. Historic archival research is at the core of my practice. My painting and mixed-media installations often feature repetitive patterns which I utilize as both surface background noise and as a site for visualizing crisis and conflict. In these patterns, I alter and manipulate both the images they depict and the notions of authoritative taste they promote.
For the past few years, I have centered my work around commemorative sites—monuments, memorials, museum collections, and historic houses—interpreting these sites as archives of public memory and cultural storytelling. Connecting ornament and oppression, the ethical core of my work is centered on challenging and resisting authoritative political and aesthetic systems.”
Lauren Frances Adams is a painter who lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. She grew up in Snow Hill, North Carolina on a pig farm. Her work engages political and social histories through iconic images and domestic ornament, and it has been exhibited across the United States at museums, university galleries, and artist-run spaces, with a recent 2021 project at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and has held residencies at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, La Cité internationale des arts in Paris, France, and Sacatar Foundation in Bahia, Brazil. She is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Award and a 2016 Pollock-Krasner Foundation award.
Her work has been published in Frieze, BmoreArt, the Baltimore Sun, ArtSlant, and Hyperallergic.
Lauren was a founding member of Ortega y Gasset Projects, a project space in New York. Her most recent curatorial project, “Rights and Wrongs,” featured ten artists in the historic Carroll Mansion in Baltimore, Maryland, in 2020.
Lauren teaches full time in the painting department at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She earned a BFA at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and an MFA at Carnegie Mellon University.
“My work explores how the pose and hand-painted backdrops circulate within vernacular prison photographs, often re-imagining them through collage, digital manipulation, and staged photography. Inspired by a future without mass incarceration, this series aims to move beyond the carceral space emphasizing landscapes as a space for freedom and hope. Through the tradition of portraiture, the legacy of the pose is celebrated as a form of agency and grandeur performance.
Larry Cook is a conceptual artist working across photography, video, and mixed media. Cook received a BA in photography from SUNY Plattsburgh and an MFA from George Washington University. Cook has exhibited his work nationally at the Kemper Art Museum, MoMA PS1, the National Portrait Gallery and internationally at Schiefe Zähne in Germany, and the 2022 Venice Biennial Art in Venice, Italy. His work is in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Harvard Art Museums, Baltimore Museum of Art, and other institutions. Cook is an assistant professor at Howard University.
“Through sculpture, installation, and mixed and extended media, I explore landscape as medium rather than subject. Observing land use and extractive practices in southern Appalachia has influenced my work to be very materially driven. The image-based and sculptural landscapes I create are intentionally estranged and fictitious. I am interested in using the tools, tropes, and cognitive framework of science fiction to create spaces that challenge and explore our relationship to our environment. By creating an alternative or fictional ground to consider, human hierarchies of presence/absence, potential/waste, and access/ boundaries can soften and reconfigure. That fluidity trails through the formal qualities of my work, where mutable material and fragmented forms accumulate and flow into ephemeral sites and speculative geographies.”
Caroline Hatfield’s practice engages with materiality and environment among many personal, creative, and theoretical influences. After completing a sculpture BFA at the University of Tennessee, she earned an MFA in interdisciplinary studio art from Towson University. Hatfield has been included in numerous publications and has exhibited artwork nationally and internationally, including recent solo exhibitions at Impart at Lincoln Memorial University and Foresights and Futures at VisArts Center in Rockville, Maryland. As an assistant professor and area coordinator of sculpture at Mississippi State University, she lives and works in Starkville, Mississippi.
“My visual art stands between history, myth, and memory, especially as it relates to African heritage. The “spirit sculptures and assemblages” in this portfolio display a collaged juxtaposition of materials that, across a wide variety of global cultures, are seen as liminal entities that connect our imperfect human world to a more limitless, magical, and perhaps empowered state of existence. My professional artistry explores connections to the past, our places, and how I take part in my community to repair fragile kinships.
Many of my exhibits place a lens on the painful specificities of Black American history with transcendent themes of the spirit. The 2019 solo exhibit “Traces of the Spirit” took place in the Baltimore Museum of Art’s “Spring House” which was built as a refrigeration storage unit on a plantation in the 19th century. My multimedia installation featured a selection of the spirit sculptures in an altar-like display with projected light, sound, and an augmented reality phone application that instilled the presence of water and slave ships passing overhead.
For 2022, I was commissioned to create two public art memorials. “The Memorial to Those Enslaved and Freed” is a public monument in Owings Mills, Maryland that celebrates and traces the origins of the people who labored as slaves for the estate of John McDonogh. The second project is the Lexington Market Plaza in Baltimore, Maryland which pays homage to the two recorded instances of enslaved persons either being sold at the market or hunted because of their connection to it. The piece seeks to seismically shift the principal idea behind “exchanging goods” in a marketspace. Robert and Rosetta, the individuals commemorated, challenge viewers to consider what one would advertise as “value” during the relegated times of slavery.
Familial and ancestral ties from Maryland, North Carolina, and the Caribbean encourage my reflections about rituals and their association with spiritual essence. Recent recognition for my work includes the Anonymous Was A Woman grant, a Trawick Prize, two Art Matters grants, a Rubys award, and solo exhibits at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture.”
Oletha DeVane is a multidisciplinary artist who explores diverse political, social identities, and cultural interpretations. Her work is in permanent museum collections, and she has exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Museum of the Bible in New York, Museum of the Americas in Washington, D.C., The Reginald F. Lewis Museum in Baltimore, the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, Tennessee, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. She has served on several boards including Maryland Art Place, School 33, Wide Angle Youth Media, Creative Alliance, and the Build Haiti Foundation. She was the program director for the Maryland State Arts Council’s Individual Artist (1979-92) and Visual Arts programs (1990-92).
Ms. DeVane was the Director of Tuttle Gallery and former head of visual arts at McDonogh School in Owings Mills, Maryland. In 2007, she was a recipient of the Rollins/Luetkemeyer Chair for Distinguished Teaching.
“We are new media artists focused on the impact of culturalpractices and productions as formative structures on the individual and the collective. Since 2009, we’ve utilized digital imagery, sculpture, CGI, video, and the web to work across diverse media, curatorial platforms, and institutional contexts. The work presents questions of identity and the body, focused on the impact of digital technologies and social spaces on the formation of subjectivities and speculative corporealities. The collaborative has created an approach that allows components of their projects to work through a networked sensibility. More recently, exhibitions have evolved to function as containers of swarm-like indexes, with each sign forming covalent bonds with those around it. Through employing queer sensibilities, speculative fictions, and networked virtuality, the duo presents a discourse focused on identity, subculture, marginality, and connectivity as a way to complicate mainstream tropes. We are influenced by queer theory, speculative fiction, human geography, and the socio-political as it relates to urban space.”
Wickerham & Lomax is the collaborative name of Baltimore-based artists Daniel Wickerham (b. Columbus, Ohio, 1986) and Malcolm Lomax (b. Abbeville, South Carolina, 1986). Their practice is based on the accelerated exchange of frivolous information, gossip, and codified language that crystallizes into accessible forms in hopes of giving dignity to that exchange.
“My work is shaped by immaterial exchanges and conversations with people who I have close relationships with, whether as shared meals, voice recordings, or therapy. I traverse the liminal space between national borders and physical places as a transnational Korean woman, simultaneously an insider and outsider, in a constant search for belonging. I blur the boundary between documentary and fiction, bridging the gap between personal and collective memory. Conscious of the manipulation and interventions of the filmmaker when documenting unfolding events and people, my own presence behind the camera is made transparent to the viewer. I acknowledge my documentation as a subjective facet of truth, that there cannot be a singular narrative but that the universal may be found in the personal. I generate non-linear narratives that may overcome cultural and language barriers. My work is a carrier for women’s voices, contemplating labor and generational time. I am interested in borderless narratives that overcome cultural barriers, addressing labor, and generational time. The viewer must place trust in the translations of vulnerable, intimate stories. Existing in the invisible space of labor that I turn my lens towards, I examine the translation of language and its failures as a container for expression.”
Cecilia Kim is a video artist living and working in Washington D.C. Born in Seoul, South Korea, Kim has also lived in Australia, England, Singapore, and the United States. She received an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work is shaped by conversations with others as she navigates the liminal space between borders and physical spaces. Her videos intersect documentary and fiction, blurring the boundaries to bridge the gap between personal narratives and collective memory. Kim was awarded Best in Show at the 19th Trawick Prize. Her work has been shown in solo and group shows including the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington Biennial: Assembly 2022 (Arlington, Virginia), The Immigrant Artist Biennial (New York City/virtual), Hamiltonian Gallery (Washington, D.C.), 0 GALLERY (Seoul, Korea), Target Gallery (Alexandria, Virginia), the Anderson Gallery (Richmond, Virginia), the Hume Gallery (Chicago, Illinois), and at film festivals and screenings including You Film Fest and No Flash Video Show. Kim has participated in Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency, Corsicana Artist and Writer Residency, VisArts Bresler Residency, and Busan International Open Arts Residence. She is currently a 2021-23 Hamiltonian Artists Fellow.
“Through my series of installations, drawings, prints, 3D printed sculptures, and sculptures, I explore the cultural aesthetics of hybridity and heterogeneity and regional and global identity. My work is conducted by labor-intensive practices, and also by equally intensive research-based processes.
In my current project, I performed a DNA test on myself, showing my firm belief that humanity has evolved based on migration and used computer modeling and digital techniques to develop new culture forms that emerge from multiculturalism and cross-cultural relations.
We cannot see our DNA, nor can we see the long ancestral history that led to us; but I strive to imagine and visualize this invisible evidence of long and complex cultural histories.”
WonJung Choi has investigated the process of mutation and evolution undertaken by diverse organisms in order to adapt to their current surroundings. This process reflects her hybrid identity through the continuous interactions between herself and current culture and society she is involved in. Her series of sculptures, paintings, drawings and installation explores the power of her ever changing identity in the making.
Choi received her MFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York and her BFA and MFA in Sculpture from Hong-Ik University in Korea. She has been awarded residencies at Museum of Arts and Design and Artists Alliance Inc (AAI) in New York.
She has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as Wave Hill, Bloomberg NYC, Real Art Ways, Gwangju Museum of Art, Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Cuchifritos, Mixed Green Gallery, Space cottonseed Singapore, Islip Museum, Creative Art Workshop, Art Place Seoul, H.P France gallery Tokyo and Arario Gallery Korea. Her work is in the collection at Samsung, Swarovski and ARCHEUS.
First published in conjunction with the exhibition
The Trawick Prize
Emerald Award
Celebrating 20 Years of Supporting Regional Artists
February 4 – March 19, 2023
American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center
Washington, DC
American University Museum
Beth Bright, Registrar
Kristin E. Howard, Marketing & Publications Specialist
Jack Rasmussen, Director & Curator
Kevin Runyon, Preparator
Aly Schuman, Assistant Registrar
Design by Lloyd Greenberg Design, LLC
Vida Russell and Lloyd Greenberg, Designers
© The American University Museum
ISBN: 979-8-9866153-7-0
4400 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington, DC 20016 www.american.edu/cas/museum
Inside front cover:
Wickerham & Lomax, Dry Zookeeper, (Cuckold Brood Series), 2022. UV print on mirror, 8 x 8 ft., 10 x 38 ft. overall. Courtesy of the artists.
Inside back cover:
Larry Cook, Roll with Me, 2022. Archival pigment print on Dibond and rhinestones, 42 x 65 in. Courtesy of the artist.