Artist Trust supported 21 artists with the 2007 Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission Fellowships. Each recipient will receive an unrestricted cash award of $6,500. The award recognizes an artist’s creative excellence and accomplishment, professional achievement and continuing dedication to their artistic discipline. In 2007, the Fellowship Program received a total of 372 applications from artists working in Music, Media, Literary and Craft Arts.

The information included in each grant recipient profile below is based on each recipient’s application materials submitted at the time of application.

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CRAFT ARTS

Shelly Hedges* (Ocean Park) is a mixed-media fiber artist. Her initial interest in quilting arose from the tradition of saving fabric scraps and then turning them into beautifully composed quilts, but her work later blossomed out of an ever-expanding list of materials such as candy wrappers, wine foils, cocktail umbrellas, used stamps, sugar packets, bottle caps, produce twist-ties, clothing labels, metal spice-tins and fruit stickers. Since receiving her Certificate in Ceramics from the Oregon College of Art and Craft, she has had solo shows at Shoalwater Cove Gallery in Ilwaco and at the Kent Arts Commission Gallery among others. Hedges has also been featured in a number of group shows around the country at venues such as the Florida State University of Fine Arts, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Oregon College of Art and Craft, Arts West, Fuller Craft Museum, Side Door Studio, Arts Council of Snohomish Gallery, Meadows Gallery, and Nicolet College Gallery.

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Jason Huff (Seattle) was born and raised in White Plains, New York, and in 1994 he received his BFA in Art from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. He moved to Seattle later that year to begin his graduate studies in the Ceramics Program at the University of Washington, where he received his MFA in ceramics in 1996. Huff has exhibited his work regionally at SOIL, Bellevue Art Museum, King County Arts Commission Gallery, and nationally at the Contemporary Crafts Gallery, San Angelo Museum of Fine Art, Contemporary Arts Collective, Donna Beam Fine Arts Gallery and the Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery. In May 2008 Huff’s work will be featured in a group show entitled Cutism at Gray Space in Reno, Nevada. His work is deeply influenced by years of dedication to watching television, which instilled in him an appreciation of iconography and image as produced through pop culture. Through his unusual themes and traditional craft, Huff hopes to communicate his wonder at our absurdity while simultaneously celebrating it.

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Masami Koda (Bothell) was born in Kobe, Japan and works primarily in glass with elements of jewelry fabrication. She explores the relationship between human beings and nature that exists on the outskirts of awareness and perception. Her pieces serve as a magnified impact of human presence upon a delicately formed representation of nature. Koda was educated at the Pilchuck School of Glass and Cleveland Institute of Arts. She earned a BFA in Art from Osaka University of Arts, and she received an MFA in Ceramics from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, both with full scholarships. In 1996 Koda was awarded three separate grants from the Japan Foundation, Consulate General of Japan, and Japanese Association of Northeast Ohio. Koda is represented by the William Traver Gallery and has solo exhibitions there dating back to 1998. 

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Tip Toland* (Vaughn) is a ceramic artist whose work is subtly autobiographical: within a frozen moment, teeming with humanity, exists a vessel for her thoughts and feelings. She earned her BFA in Ceramics at the University of Colorado and later received an MFA in Ceramics from Montana State University. Her previous accolades include a Visual Arts Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist-in-Residences in Wyoming, Oregon, Montana, and Washington, an Artist Trust GAP grant, and the Virginia A. Groot Foundation Grant among others. She is a full-time studio artist and a part-time instructor in the Seattle area. In addition, she conducts workshops across the United States. Her work has been shown in numerous galleries, including Nancy Margolis in New York City and Pacini-Lubel in Seattle. Her work is represented in both private and public collections, including the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian, Kohler Art Center, and a promised gift to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has an extensive list of solo exhibitions dating back to 1982 and an upcoming show in 2008 at the Bellevue Arts Museum.

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Cynthia Toops (Seattle) was born in Hong Kong and began making polymer clay beads and jewelry in 1986, inspired on by Lois Dubin’s book, The History of Beads. Over the years she has experimented with many decorative techniques for polymer clay , including borrowing ancient techniques. Toops is also incorporating these same concepts into her new felt work. She began her education with a BA in Biology from Drake University. She then moved on to The Factory for Visual Arts before earning her BFA in Printmaking from the University of Washington. Her work has appeared in various galleries across the country, most recently at Facere Gallery and Pacini-Lubel in Seattle. Toops’s work has also been in exhibitions at several museums including the Tacoma Art Museum, Bellevue Art Museum and American Craft Museum among others.

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LITERARY ARTS 

Kathleen Alcalá (Bainbridge Island) is the author of the short-story collection Mrs. Vargas and the Dead Naturalist and three novels set in nineteenth-century Mexico: Spirits of the Ordinary, The Flower in the Skull, and Treasures in Heaven. She has received the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, the Governor’s Writer’s Award, the Western States Book Award, the Washington State Book Award and the Centro Cultural Hispano Americano Quimbaya Award among others. She is a co-founder and contributing editor to The Raven Chronicles, and she has been a Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of New Mexico and a writer-in-residence at Richard Hugo House and Seattle University. Her work has been adapted for both radio and theatre, and two of her novels have been translated into Spanish and Dutch. The Desert Remembers My Name: Family and Writing is her first work of nonfiction. Alcalá holds a BA in Human Language from Stanford University as well as an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington. She was born in Compton, California to Mexican parents and currently lives on Bainbridge Island.

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Sharon Bryan* (Clinton) is the author of Planet on the Table: Poets on the Reading Life and Where We Stand: Women Poets on Literary Tradition. She has also published three collections of poems: Objects of Affection, Flying Blind and Salt Air. Her fourth collection of poems, Stardust, will be published by BOA Editions in 2009. Her work has been reviewed in such publications as The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, The Seattle Times, The Salt Lake Tribune and Amazon Online Booksellers. In addition to being an accomplished author, Sharon has taught at Dartmouth College, University of Washington, Memphis State University, University of Missouri and the University of Connecticut at Storrs. She received a BA in Philosophy from the University of Utah, an MA in Anthropology from Cornell University and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa. She is currently at work on a poetry collection, Bare Bones, and a nonfiction book, Searching for Andras, based on her mother’s pen-pal correspondence with a young man in Budapest between 1936 and 1941.

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Brain Culhane (Seattle) lives with his wife and children in Seattle, where he teaches at Lakeside School. He grew up in Manhattan and attended the City University of New York where he earned a BA, then Columbia University where he earned an MFA in Poetry, and finally the University of Washington where he completed his PhD in English Literature. His poems have appeared in such journals as The Hudson Review, The New Criterion, The New Republic and The Paris Review. Culhane has been a finalist for the Campbell Poetry Prize, the Morse Poetry Prize and the Walt Whitman Award. His most recent collection of poetry, The King's Question, has won the Emily Dickinson First Book Prize and will be published by Graywolf Press in October 2008.

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Felicia R. Gonzalez* (Seattle) is a poet and author who was born in Cuba and was profoundly influenced by growing up on an island and its relationship to language and writing. In both English and Spanish, her work is intended to be an exploration of cultural identity, family dynamics, what it means to be female within and between cultures, and queer identity. Her poetry celebrates the oral tradition of Cuba combined with percussive rhythms, African folk tales and bedtime stories. Gonzalez is an alumna of the Hedgebrook Writers Retreat and the Jack Straw Writers Programs, and she has been in several artist-in-residence programs. Her work has appeared in publications such as Metropolitan Living Magazine and Art Papers Magazine among others. In 2006 she was awarded an Individual Artist Grant from the Seattle Mayor’s Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs for her newly released chapbook entitled Recollection Graffiti.

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Julie Larios (Seattle) received a BA in English/Creative Writing and an MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from the University of Washington. Larios’s poetry has been published in many reviews and national magazines including The Atlantic, McSweeney’s, The Threepenny Review, Field and others. She is the winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Pushcart Prize for Poetry and a Smithsonian Magazine Outstanding Children’s Book Award among others. Her work has been chosen twice for The Best of American Poetry series. For five years she was the poetry editor of the Cortland Review, and for two years she worked as Editorial Assistant to David Wagoner at Poetry Northwest. She is the author of three books for children: On the Stairs, Have You Ever Done That?, and Yellow Elephant. A forth book for children, Imaginary Menagerie, is due out in spring 2008. Her work often has a whimsical feel as she plays with vocabulary from the construction of taxonomies and other scientific activities, changing their meaning through context. Larios currently teaches in the MFA, Writing for Children Program at Vermont College.

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Peter Ludwin (Kent) is a poet and former member of the 1970s folk band Rag Daddy. He has performed and taught workshops for many years at the Northwest Folklife Festival. For the past six years Peter has been accepted in the San Miguel Poetry Week in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico and has studied under poets such as Mark Doty, Alfred Corn, C.D. Wright, Forrest Gander, Stanley Moss, Patricia Goedecke and Linda Gregg. In poetry he has been a featured reader in Washington, Oregon and California, including for the Distinguished Writer’s Series in Tacoma and the Kent Canterbury Fair. Through the sound and flow of his poetry, Peter aims for resonance with his readers to take them out of their normal frame of reference and allow them to experience it in a different way.

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Nancy Pagh (Bellingham) received an MA in Literature and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of New Hampshire as well as a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of British Columbia. Her first collection of poems, No Sweeter Fat, won the Autumn House Press book competition and was published in 2007. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals, magazines and anthologies, including The Bellingham Review, Rattle, Poetry Northwest, Crab Creek Review, Pontoon, Rock Salt Plum, Poetry Daily and O Magazine. Pagh has been featured on “The Beat” and “Sound Focus,” literary segments on KUOW, and she was three times nominated for the Pushcart literary prize. She is a frequent and enthusiastic reader at Northwest bookshops and galleries and a headliner at the 2007 Gist Street Master’s Poetry Series in Pittsburg. Nancy’s first book, At Home Afloat: Women on the Waters of the Pacific Northwest (2001), is a critical study of the language women use when traveling at sea. She is an adjunct faculty member at Western Washington University.

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Nancy Rawles (Seattle) is the author of three novels: Love Like Gumbo won an American Book Award for its portrayal of a lesbian daughter’s struggle for independence from her warm but suffocating family. Crawfish Dreams tells the story of an elder’s coming to terms with the devastation of her community and the depression of her offspring. This novel was selected for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. My Jim tells the story of the wife and children of Mark Twain’s famous slave character from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. My Jim is the winner of American Library Association’s Alex Award for adult books that appeal to teen readers. Rawles has also received a Jack Straw Productions Artist Project Award, a King County Arts Commission Special Projects Award, a Seattle Arts Commission Seattle Artist Award and an Artist Trust Fellowship in Playwriting (1994) among others.

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Maya Sonenberg (Seattle) is the current director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Washington. She earned her BA from Wesleyan University and her MFA from Brown University. Among her accolades are the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, first prize in the Passages North Fiction Contest, finalist for the Richard Sullivan Prize, finalist for the Andres Berger Literary Awards among others. She is currently working on two books, a mix of fiction and nonfiction about the 1960s and a collection of short stories about parents and children. Her second collection of short stories, Voices from the Blue Hotel was published by Chiasmus Press in 2006.

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Jill Widner* (Yakima) has been published in North American Review, Seventeen Magazine, Denver Quarterly, Hawai’I Review and Sister Stew: An Anthology of Women’s Writing. This summer she was awarded a residency at Yaddo to work on her novel in progress, The Smell of Sulphur, which fictionalizes her experience growing up the daughter of a petroleum engineer in Indonesia from 1963 to 1969. “River Swim,” an excerpt from The Smell of Sulphur, was awarded honorable mention in the 2006 Kurt Vonnegut fiction competition and was published in North American Review. Widner received an MFA in Fiction from the University of Iowa, and she currently teaches at Yakima Valley Community College.

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MEDIA ARTS

Stefan Gruber (Seattle) is an animator and performance artist. He creates a short-hand drawn, digitally finished film every year. The two most recent films are Anaelle (2006), which is being screened on 35mm in front of feature length films all over Washington, and Petting Zoo (2007), which premiered at the Wholphin release party. His animated content has been incorporated into local modern dance groups such as Lingo, the Degenerate Art Ensemble, and Paige Barnes and the Grizzles. He also makes comics for print and performs them with live actors under the name Slide Rule. His other job is to host animation classes at Nova Alternative High School, the Frye Art Museum, and the Northwest Film Forum. Works from those schools screen once a year in a festival put on in art-house theatres. Gruber was a finalist for the Stranger Genius Award in 2006, and he has won honors from the Seattle Arts Commission, Artist Trust, 4Culture, Princess Grace Foundation, and the Student Academy. Gruber received a BFA in Experimental Animation from CalArts.  

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Sarah Jane Lapp (Snohomish) is an animator, writer and non-fiction filmmaker. She began her education at Brown University where she earned a BA in Playwriting. She then moved to Prague and studied film production at Filmova a Televizni Fakulta Academie Muzickych Umeni in addition to being an animation apprentice at Studio Bratri v Triku. Lastly, she received her MFA from the Department of Filmmaking at the Art Institute of Chicago. Lapp’s most recent works in animation include The Skeleton and The Swarm, both commercials commissioned by and for the Seattle Channel’s Artzone. Lapp’s accolades include the Jerome Foundation New York Media Arts Grant, an Artist Trust GAP grant, a Bellagio/Rockefeller Foundation Residency, among many others. Lapp is currently finishing her longest animation so far, Chronicles of a Professional Eulogist.

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MUSIC ARTS

Eric Banks (Seattle) was born and raised in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. He received his BA in Composition from Yale University. Eric studied orchestral conducting with Alasdair Neale, choral conducting with Marguerite Brooks, and composition with Fenno Heath. Banks then moved to Seattle to study at the University of Washington’s School of Music. Eric’s musical interests have always been international in scope with a particular fascination for new and undiscovered composition for voices. Since returning to Seattle from an academic fellowship in Sweden, he has been able to combine his love of music, poetry, classical civilization, foreign language, religious history and astronomy, to compose several works for a cappella chorus. Eric teaches musicianship, voice, composition and music theory at Cornish College of the Arts, and he is the director of ÆDONIS, an a cappella men’s ensemble that focuses on performing the music of gay and lesbian poets and composers. His upcoming projects include a Sanskrit hymn to Saraswati and a cantata based on ancient Zoroastrian chants, for which Eric was awarded a grant from 4Culture and the Seattle Mayor’s Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs CityArtists Award.

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Lori Goldston (Seattle) is a performer, teacher and studio musician who has worked with the likes of David Byrne, Mirah, Nirvana, Cat Power, Laura Veirs, Heather Duby, Ellen Fullman, The Presidents of the United States of America, John Doe, Marco de Carvalho, Seattle Creative Orchestra, Cinerama and many others from 1983 to the present. She has also participated in cross-disciplinary works, composing music for film, theatre and performance. She is currently composing for a Middle East influenced, acoustic rock band and enjoying her ongoing work with an improvisational music, noise and spoken word ensemble; a suite of solo cello structured improvisations; and preliminary groundwork for a multi-media opera that looks at the nature of personal risk in leftist politics. Goldston has received numerous awards and grants from King County Arts Commission, Artist Trust and Jack Straw Productions among others.

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Joshua Kohl (Seattle) is a co-founder, conductor, composer and artistic director for Degenerate Art Ensemble (DAE), a Seattle-based music and multi-art performance company. Kohl attended Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory of Music, and he received a BA in Composition from Cornish College of the Arts. Over the years he has been awarded commissions and grants from Meet the Composer, Seattle Mayor’s Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, 4Culture, Washington State Arts Commission, Artist Trust, On the Boards and the Nesholm Family Foundation. Kohl’s theatre, concert, and dance work outside of DAE has been with the Book-it Repertory Theater on their 2007 Tale of Two Cities production, the Northwest Symphony for his clarinet concerto in 2000 and with the San Francisco based dance/music/theatre company InkBoat on three productions in the US and Germany. His current project c(h)ord (with Inkboat), commissioned by Yerba Buena Center, is set to premiere in April 2008.

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Paul Rucker* (Seattle) is an interdisciplinary artist who focuses on interactive sound/video installations. As a cellist-bassist-composer, Rucker creates new music compositions and presents them in a way that allows the viewer/listener the opportunity to interact with the work. The participants can trigger sounds with the wave of a hand, touch of a finger or press of a button. His pieces have been on display at Consolidated Works, Motel Motel Motel, Jack Straw New Media Gallery, the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, and On the Boards. Rucker has received numerous grants for the creation of visual art and music from 4Culture, Seattle Mayor’s Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, South Carolina Arts Commission, Washington State Arts Commission, King County Site Specific and Photo Center NW. He has also been awarded residencies at Blue Mountain Center, Ucross Foundation, Art OMI, Banff Center and the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center in Bellagio, Italy. As a musician and director, he plays in various roles from solo cellist to leader of his LARGE ENSEMBLE of 22 musicians.

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*These awards are provided through generous funding from the Washington State Arts Commission.

This year’s Fellowship awards are made possible, in part, through generous gifts from: Nancy and Buster Alvord, Eve and Chap Alvord, Shari and John Behnke, Sally Behnke, Linda Breneman, Sharon and Craig Campbell, Michael and Cathy Casteel, Katharyn A. Gerlich, Paul Goode, Gary Hill, Arthur Lange, Mia McEldowney and Bill Mitchell, Linda and Jerry Paros, Jon and Mary Shirley, Catherine Eaton Skinner and David Skinner, Nancy Skinner Nordhoff and Lynn Hays, Merrill Wagner and Bob Ryman.

Institutional support of Artist Trust’s core programs, including Fellowships, comes from:
Norcliffe Foundation, Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, PONCHO, and the Washington State Arts Commission
and all contributors to our annual fund.

Statistics for the 2007 Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship

Applicants and Recipients from Each Discipline
Craft: 91 applicants; 5 recipients
Literary: 186 applicants; 10 recipients
Media: 35 applicants; 2 recipients
Music: 60 applicants; 4 recipients

Locations of Applicants
King County: 244
Western Washington (excluding King County): 100
Eastern Washington: 16
Central Washington: 12

A total of 372 artists in Washington State applied this year.
21 artists were awarded Fellowships.