Wisconsin Arts Board Awards
Fellowships in
Visual Arts and Media Arts
Eight Wisconsin artists will receive fellowships
for work in visual arts and media arts from the Wisconsin Arts Board as a part
of its 2006 Artist Fellowship Awards program. The recipients are:
Media Arts
- Dan Klopp, Filmmaker
Milwaukee
Visual Arts
- Kyoung Ae Cho, Crafts/Fiber
Milwaukee
- Santiago Cucullu, Art
Installation
Milwaukee
- Sephem Hilyard, Mixed Media
Madison
- Tom
Loeser, Crafts/Wood
Madison
- Stephen
R. Milanowski, Photographer
Madison
- Chris
Niver, Drawing
Milwaukee
- Amy
Ruffo, Drawing
Sheboygan
The biographies of the fiscal year 2006 recipients
can be read below.
This statewide program provides $8,000 awards to
outstanding professional artists in recognition of their significant
contributions to their field. These funds are intended to be used to create new
work, complete work in progress, and/or pursue activities that contribute to
their artistic growth.
The Wisconsin Arts Board received 156
applications from visual artists, and 10 applications from media artists
throughout the state. Awards were determined by two panels of arts
professionals, based on the artistic quality of the applicants’ work samples.
Panelists recommended the eight artists to members of the Wisconsin Arts Board
for its final approval.
The Artist Fellowship Awards program offers
fellowships in a variety of disciplines over a two-year cycle. Application
deadlines for the upcoming fellowship cycle, available in literary arts, music
composition, and dance choreography/performance art, will be September 15,
2006. Wisconsin’s professional literary artists, music composers, and
choreographers are eligible to apply. Applications will be available on-line by
August 4, 2006. More information on the program is available at
www.artsboard.wisconsin.gov/static/fellwshp.htm. Artists may also call
608/266-0190 or email the Wisconsin Arts Board at
artsboard@wisconsin.gov to include their name on the
electronic mailing list which will
automatically send notice when the grant cycle opens.
Biographies of 2006 Wisconsin Arts
Board Fellowship Award Winners in Media Arts and Visual Arts
Media Arts
Dan Klopp, Filmmaker
Milwaukee
Dan Klopp is a filmmaker who has lived in Milwaukee for the past ten years. “My
work has evolved from short experimental films to a style of documentary
filmmaking that incorporates techniques of experimental cinema. I have a
fascination with low-fi early film techniques and cinema verite. My career has
been changed drastically by the emergence my latest documentary project,” says Klopp.
That project focuses on the true drama of a man’s attempts to swim across Lake
Superior. Klopp received his BFA in Filmmaking from the
University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. Currently he owns the film production
company Keyhole Films. While attending film school, Klopp worked as the film
curator at the campus Union Theatre. He programmed independent and world cinema
that wasn’t screened anywhere else in the area, and was largely influenced by
the films of Hong Kong’s Wong Kar-Wai, Canada’s Guy Maddin, and many of the
documentary filmmakers of the seventies and early eighties. He noted that
directors like D.A. Pennebaker, Errol Morris, and the Maysles brothers made
films which artfully caught the truthful moments in people’s lives. Klopps’s
work has been screened in Milwaukee at venues such as Beauty Benefit for the
Arts and the Milwaukee Outdoor Experimental Film Festival, and received the
first place award from Milwaukee’s Twelve Hour Film Contest for the short film
The Expulsion Variations.
Visual Arts
Kyoung Ae Cho, Crafts/Fiber
Milwaukee
Kyoung Ae Cho is a fiber artist who exhibits, teaches, and conducts
residencies. “My investigation into environmental processing is to explore an
understanding of nature’s rhythm in our culture and how we as people interact
with it as well. Everyday we hear of tragedies that happen upon our earth and
these tragedies bring forth the loss of living elements. With growing concern
in environmental issues, the understanding of nature’s rhythm and the recycling
of materials have become important and this has peaked my thoughts in how I
work. I respectfully approach this environmental processing by incorporating
recycled matter as well as low-valued materials mostly which I have
gathered. Gathering and collecting objects/materials are very important parts
of my work process…. In the process I examine nature to understand its language
through shape, pattern, color, texture, scale and its changes. My works are
produced as a result of conversation between nature and I. Through this
process, I want to have my work carry the beauty and the power that I see and
feel in nature.” Kyoung Ae Cho received a MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art,
Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and a BFA from Duksung Women’s University, Seoul,
South Korea. She is currently an Associate Professor at the University of
Wisconsin – Milwaukee, where she has received multiple awards for her art. She
also received a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in New York. Her
work has been shown in museums and galleries throughout the country and Guam,
and at various international venues in South Korea and Taiwan.
Santiago Cucullu
Milwaukee
For the past several years, Santiago Cucullu has concentrated on creating large
wall pieces, watercolors, and non-figurative works that incorporate plastic
materials. Although very different in their
underlying structure, Cucullu’s works in these genre share similar
sensibilities and he does not see them as necessarily exclusive of one another.
He is interested in the ways that all of these projects can transcend a type of
temporality that is inherent in their materials and their display while they
work towards a structure that is grounded in empiricism. The origins of the
work are the same and force a memory and intelligence out of
themselves. Frequently projects are driven by the juxtaposition of historically
marginal events and their protagonists. Cucullu combines specific imagery from
real places and documented images of the historical protagonists with images
culled from his own experience to structure images within a limited scope. The
elements of character, plot construction, conflict, and time become buried, and
images of different stories start to stack together as their parts are replaced
or embellished. Santiago Cucullu earned his BFA from Hartford Art School
in Connecticut, and his MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
Most recently his installation work has been shown in exhibitions at the
Rubenstein Gallery in New York, the Henry Art Gallery
in Seattle and Museo de arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey, Mexico. Cuculla was
awarded an Arcus Project Ibaraki, Japan residency and he has been a recipient
of the Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship.
Stephen Hilyard
Madison
The underlying preoccupation of Stephen Hilyard’s work is the quality of
experience termed the Sublime, that which has been identified as
un-presentable. What interests him most about the Sublime is that it eludes us.
It remains conceivable, but not imaginable, an ideal to which we aspire no
matter how many times we fail in our attempts to express it. Hilyard finds this
both heroic and poignant. His work is designed to remind the viewer that she is
in the presence of artifice, that this work is attempting to present something
of a profound nature, but that it is failing because of its connections to the
concrete. An Assistant Professor of Digital Art at the University of
Wisconsin, Madison, Hilyard earned his MFA from the University of Southern
California. Most recently his mixed media work has been shown at the Haus
Gallery in Pasadena, California and at Phatspace Gallery in Sydney, Australia. Hilyard
is a McKnight Fellow.
Tom Loeser
Madison
Tom Loeser works in wood, exploring seating as an interactive and social event
and the relation between internal and external space in smaller cabinets. In
his current work, Loeser is interested in how seating can organize, influence
and structure social relationships and how within his wall cabinets, the
viewer/user can enjoy the different ways of accessing the irregular internal
spaces behind the various door and handle (or hole) configurations. A Professor
of Art at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Loeser earned a BFA from Boston
University, a BA from Haverford College, and an MFA from the University of
Massachusetts. Most recently he has exhibited his work in New York City and in
San Francisco. Loeser has earned numerous fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Arts, a Creative Artist Exchange Fellowship, a fellowship
from the Royal Society for The Encouragement of Art, London, England, and a
Japan-US Friendship Commission.
Stephen R. Milanowski
Madison
Stephen Milanowski’s recent work has been in pursuit of a portraiture that he
has termed Public Portraits or Documentary Portraits—images that have been
created with a hand-held 4x5 (large format) camera along with a powerful
portable strobe. These images have typically been shown in print sizes of 40" x 60". He has been following an idea that attempts to merge formal
portraiture with the influence of those areas in photography that have captured
great truthfulness and unguardedness—the Snapshot and reportage. Exploring what
we look like when we are out in public, he asks, “What does a formal portrait
look like when the subject is less guarded and yet aware that a portrait is
being created?” A graduate of the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Milanowski also
earned a BA from MIT. He has received grants from The Trophy Corporation,
Paris, France; The Polaroid Corporation; and the Michigan Council on the Arts.
Chris Niver
Milwaukee
Chris Niver’s approach to his work begins with ink drawings in his sketchbook,
trying to keep the form of those drawings open for as long as possible. As the
drawings accumulate, a few stand out and these he transcribes, by means of
needle and thread, onto white cotton. The cotton is then hemmed to the same
dimensions as the original drawing. The added dimension of the raised thread,
clearly labor intensive, and the seeming spontaneity of the drawing create an
interesting juxtaposition. Niver earned his MA from the University
Wisconsin-Milwaukee and his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago. His most recent exhibition was at the Wriston Art Center at Lawrence
University in Appleton, Wisconsin. Niver received a Milwaukee County Fellowship
and earned an honorable mention in the eight counties Triennial, at the John
Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan.
Amy Ruffo
Sheboygan
Ruffo earned her MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills,
Michigan, and her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her drawings
start with a visual exploration by sketching and taking photos to catalog and
construct compositions and lines she finds of interest. From treetops against a
clear sky to a mass of power lines to detailed views of newly leafing spring
trees, Ruffo’s sketches are formed by her landscape photographs. Her process
evolves through hours of sketching to find new lines and characters and photos
cataloged and collaged to find compositions and spaces divisions. In each new
drawing Ruffo finds a special mark that generates another—cyclical and
expansive. Ruffo’s has exhibited throughout the United States and was part of
the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art’s, 2003 Wisconsin Biennial in Madison,
Wisconsin.
Contact: Mark Fraire, 608/264-8191
Date Posted: 1/19/06
