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December 14, 2006
B.J. Adler, Executive Director, Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, and Carina Del Valle Schorski, Portfolio Gold Award Winner, Scholastic Writing Awards of 2005, 12-15-06
Founded in 1923 to provide guidance and support for the next generation of artists and writers, The Alliance for Young Artists & Writers provides resources nationwide to encourage, connect and empower creative youth—through event and online networking, workshops, scholarships and career exploration with alumni role models and industry mentors. The signature program of the Alliance is the Scholastic Art & Writing awards—a platform for creative expression for millions of students across the country as the Alliance brings outstanding visual art and writing created by teenagers to a national audience and encourages their creative journey and career development. In addition to awarding annual scholarships to top portfolio award recipients, the Alliance collaborates with colleges across the country that make an additional $1.5 million in financial aid available to award recipients with exceptional promise.
Since 1923, more than 13 million of America’s most talented junior high and high school students (grades 7-12) have participated in The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and 2.5 million have been recognized and shared in more than $25 million in cash awards and college scholarships. Some notable past recipients include: Andy Warhol, Robert Redford, Truman Capote, Richard Avedon, Sylvia Plath, Joyce Maynard, Philip Pearlstein, Joyce Carol Oates and Bernard Malamud. Today, The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards continue to fulfill its mission of providing a creative platform of expression for millions of students across the country.
B.J. Adler has been Executive Director of the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers since 1998. She brings to her position as Executive Director more than 20 years of experience as a leader in arts education. Ms. Adler began her career as a classroom teacher in Kansas City, MO, and later ran the Kansas City Chapter of Young Audiences. There, she was responsible for the creation of a program called Learning Through the Arts, combining the resources of the cultural and educational communities to bring the arts to students, and to harness the power of the arts in the teaching of other academic subjects. Ms. Adler was the Executive Director of Chamber Music America from 1982-1985 and Education Director of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center from 1987-1992. Prior to accepting her current position with the Alliance she served as National Education Director of Young Audiences from 1992-1998. Ms. Adler has served as a consultant to a number of arts education organizations, including ArtsConnection, the 92nd Street Y, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Alliance for the Arts, and the New York Philharmonic. She is the author of a policy paper on the role of the arts in the New York City Public Schools.
Posted by David Lemberg at 08:05 PM | Comments (0)
December 13, 2006
Leo Eylar, Music Director and Conductor, California Youth Symphony, 12-15-06
Founded in 1952 the California Youth Symphony has taught thousands of students and includes two full symphony orchestras — the CYS Orchestra and the CYS Associate Orchestra, as well as a percussion ensemble and six additional groups for younger musicians.
The 2006-2007 membership of the California Youth Symphony includes almost 500 of the greater Bay Area's most promising young musicians ranging in age from nine to 18 and representing more than 100 elementary, middle and high schools.
Under the direction of Leo Eylar, the CYS Orchestra is the most advanced ensemble reserved for outstanding players whose technical level and musicality is highly advanced. The orchestra has established an international reputation for its outstanding performances. The orchestra performs a seven-concert series between November and May, plus an annual Holiday Concert in conjunction with other CYS ensembles.
In June 2006 the CYS Orchestra toured China. They have also toured Italy, Japan, Taiwan and to Central Europe, where CYS won the Grand Prize at the International Youth and Music Festival in Vienna.
Leo Eylar is currently a professor and conductor at California State University Sacramento, a position he has held since 1988. Since 1990 he has been Conductor and Music Director of the California Youth Symphony. Under his masterful and spirited direction the orchestra soon enhanced its reputation as one of the finest youth orchestras in the world and won first prize in the International Youth and Music Festival in Vienna, Austria, in July 1994. Over the past 16 years of his tenure, the orchestra has performed to great critical acclaim across four continents. He has also guest-conducted extensively throughout Europe and Asia, including prestigious music festivals in Japan, Austria, France, and Australia. Eylar has also been a frequent guest conductor of the San Jose Symphony. With a repertoire of over 250 symphonic works conducted, as well as numerous operas, Eylar brings a vast range of expertise and depth to his conducting.
Posted by David Lemberg at 03:31 PM | Comments (0)
December 08, 2006
Dr. Franklin Kelly, Senior Curator of American and British Painting, National Gallery of Art, and Professor, Department of Art History and Archaeology, University of Maryland, 12-8-06
Dr. Franklin Kelly is Senior Curator of American and British Painting, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and a Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology, University of Maryland. He received training in art history from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (B.A., 1974), the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art (M.A., 1979), and the University of Delaware (Ph.D., 1985).
Dr. Kelly's concentration is on 19th- and early 20th-century American painting. His publications include Frederic Edwin Church and the National Landscape (1988), Frederic Edwin Church (1989), Thomas Cole's Paintings of Eden (1995), and Nineteenth-Century American Paintings in the National Gallery of Art (1996), as well as articles and essays on a wide range of artists, including William Sidney Mount, Thomas Eakins, George Bellows, Edward Hopper, and Charles Sheeler.
In 1995 he was the co-curator of the Winslow Homer exhibition, organized by the National Gallery of Art, and co-author of the accompanying catalogue. More recently he was the curator for Twentieth-Century American Art: The Ebsworth Collection, seen at the National Gallery of Art and at the Seattle Art Museum during 2000. He co-organized the exhibition Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford, which opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2003 and was subsequently seen at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, TX, and at the National Gallery in 2004.
John Constable's (1776–1837) seminal six-foot landscapes—among the best-known and beloved images in British art—are reunited with their groundbreaking full-size sketches for the first time since the artist's death in Constable's Great Landscapes: The Six-Foot Paintings, at the National Gallery of Art, East Building, October 1 through December 31, 2006. Fifty-five works include oils and drawings that are related to the large landscapes, an early pencil portrait, and a series in varied media brought together for the first time, illustrating areas along the Stour River in Suffolk known to many as "Constable Country." The exhibition and its companion catalogue examine why Constable produced the six-foot sketches.
Eight finished six-foot paintings, including The White Horse (1819), Stratford Mill (1820), The Hay Wain (1821), View in the Stour near Dedham (1822), The Lock (1824), The Leaping Horse (1825), Hadleigh Castle (1829), and Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1831) are paired with their corresponding full-size oil sketches, while Chain Pier, Brighton (1827) is presented with related smaller oil sketches. Two large finished versions of The Opening of the Waterloo Bridge(c. 1829–1832) and what is believed to be a full-size sketch from the very end of Constable's life, Stoke-by-Nayland (c.1835–1837), will also be on view.
Posted by David Lemberg at 08:33 AM | Comments (0)
Dr. William Henry Banchs, President, National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, 12-8-06
Headquartered in Miami, FL, the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts (NFAA) was founded in 1981 and is supported nationally by a broad base of individuals, corporations, foundations and philanthropic institutions. NFAA encourages artistic growth and career development through workshops, public performances and exhibitions, internships, underwriting of creative projects and residency fellowships. These fellowships include stipends from Fellowships in the Visual Arts.
The foundation awards high school seniors more than $500,000 in cash prizes each year for achievement in the performing, literary and visual arts. It also nominates presidential scholars in the arts, and some colleges refer to its rosters for recruitment. The program draws from a diverse student population. The foundation sends out information to 26,000 high schools across the country. Applications come from every state, more than 90 percent of them from public schools. About one-third of the applicants and about 40 percent of winners identify themselves as members of minorities.
NFAA serves as a springboard for successful careers in the arts by helping young artists realize and pursue their dreams in the fields of Classical, Jazz and Popular Music, Voice, Dance, Film and Video, Photography, Theater, Visual Arts and Writing.
Past winners, have included the novelist Allegra Goodman, the actress Vanessa Williams, the dancer and choreographer Desmond Richardson, the actor Ron Eldard, at least 15 dancers from the New York City Ballet and eight members of the New York Philharmonic.
Last year 160 of the more than 6500 applicants were chosen to spend a week in Miami for the annual ArtsWeek, all expenses paid, working together and taking master classes with Mikhail Baryshnikov, Michael Tilson Thomas and Plácido Domingo, among others. From this group 38 winners were chosen to perform in New York; top prizes are $10,000 and $5000.
Dr. William Henry Banchs has been President of the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts since 1991. Dr. Banchs received his B.A. in Physics and Chemistry (1970) from Harvard University, and his M.A. (1976) and Ph.D. (1978) in Music Composition and Theory from Harvard University. In 2004 he received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Posted by David Lemberg at 08:31 AM | Comments (0)
Julie Shigekuni, Editor, Blue Mesa Review, and Associate Professor of English, University of New Mexico, 12-8-06
The Blue Mesa Review is a literary journal published by the creative writing department at the University of New Mexico (UNM). Blue Mesa Review was founded by UNM’s Rudolfo Anaya, Gene Frumkin, David Johnson, Patricia Clark Smith, and Lee Bartlett in 1981 as a way to bring national recognition to writers from the American Southwest. Nearly a quarter of a century later, Blue Mesa Review remains committed to publishing regional writers alongside nationally recognized artists and exceptionally talented newcomers. Distinguished by the multi-ethnic and diverse cultural heritage of its contributors, Blue Mesa Review strives to combine personal vision and aesthetics with a high degree of intellectual curiosity.
Upcoming issues will include an interview with Native American scholar and novelist Gerald Vizenor, and as part of BMR’s new translations section, renowned Chinese poet Ting Shu’s debut in English. Also featured will be the work of highly regarded poets Mary Ruefle and Hilda Raz and emerging poet Lauren Goodwin Slaughter. Fiction contributors include Jacob M. Appel, Dulcie Leimbach, and Anis Shivani. Nonfiction essays and book reviews round out every volume.
Julie Shigekuni has won several awards for her writing, including the PEN Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature, a Henfield award, and the Japanese American National Literary Award. Ms. Shigekuni’s first novel, A Bridge Between Us, was published by Doubleday/Anchor in 1996 and received favorable reviews in the New York Times Book Review, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, and other major publications, and was translated into German, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian. It was featured by Barnes & Noble Booksellers in their first Discover Great New Writers series and was selected as a finalist for that award.
In addition to her literary endeavors, Ms. Shigekuni is currently co-producing, directing, and writing a 60-minute video documentary. Manju Mammas and the An-Pan Brigade is the story of three Nisei Christian women and their nontraditional offspring. In Manju Mammas, Ms. Shigekuni explores how Christianity moved from a religion taken on for convenience to true belief in the Nisei women’s Fundamentalist offspring.
Posted by David Lemberg at 08:27 AM | Comments (0)