Forward Art Prize Exhibit

media release: An exhibition of work by the appliciants to this year's Forward Art Prize, an initiative sponsored by the Women Artists Forward Fund, will be on display at Aubergine Gallery, a Willy Street Co-op Community Space at 1226 Williamson Street, from Saturday, November 2 through Sunday, December 1, 2024. Gallery hours are Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:00am to 2:00pm and by appointment.

A reception, which will include the announcement of this year's Forward Art Prize recipients, will be held at Aubergine Gallery on Friday, November 1, 2024 from 5:00pm to 7:00pm (announcement at 5:30pm).

The Forward Art Prize offers two annual, unrestricted $10,000 awards for women visual artists living in Dane County, WI who show exceptional creativity in their work and compelling prospects for the future. Selections are made through an open, juried, competitive application process each summer.

This award is designed to provide recipients with the flexibility to pursue their own artistic, intellectual, and professional activities in the absence of specific obligations and only minor reporting requirements. The Forward Art Prize is specifically given to individual artists, not organizations. The discoveries, actions, and ideas that shape our community and society often begin with the ground-breaking efforts of individual creative people. The prize is award to women identifying visual artists who are deeply engaged in artistic practices that inspire new ways of thinking, new behaviors, or new ways of engaging communities. 

update:

The Women Artists Forward Fund announced Rebecca Kautz and Ann Orlowski as winners of the 2024 Forward Art Prize in a celebration on Saturday night at the Madison-based Aubergine Gallery. Kautz and Orlowski are the recipients of the prestigious unrestricted $10,000 visual arts award that recognizes outstanding women artists in Dane County. The Forward Art Prize is now in its sixth year. The Forward Art Prize’s 2024 jurors, Rachel Davis, Yeonhee Cheong, Simona Chazen, Martha Glowacki, and Yvette Pino noted the high quality of work submitted this year, making the selection process especially difficult.

Both Orlowski and Kautz are well known in Dane County visual arts scene and use the central theme of home as a launching pad to explore themes of the personal and private, though in vastly different ways. Kautz’s lush paintings and drawings of interior home settings explore identity, belonging and place, using candy colors that harken to '80s and '90s pop culture  and modern art movements. Her work is filled with intermingled nods to 17th century Dutch still life painting, surrealism, and folk art, with an abundance of porcelain dinnerware, dead birds, pieces of rotting fruit, and relics of early American décor, including an ever-present Defiant style Vermont castings wood burning stove. But the niceties stop there, as each painting is also filled with displaced objects that could evoke terror, disharmony, or a feeling of quiet dislocation or unease. Juror Rachel Davis says of Kautz’s work, “Rebecca’s work is dynamic and sophisticated,” while jurors Martha Glowacki and Simona Chazen found her historical references and execution beautifully rendered and full of tension.

While Kautz’s references to home are representational, Ann Orlowski’s references to home are abstracted and reductive, emphasizing the interiority of home spaces in a collection of forms that float together in space, like a complicated, subtle origami form. Ann’s repetitive use of triangle squares and hard-edged, geometric shapes and her intersecting flat shapes create the illusion of a three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional plane. Her seductive, lush, understated tones of blues, greens, and sepia tones and her abstracted images of home hover above a solid ground of color. In her recent exhibition at Abel Contemporary, Orlowski branched out in new ways, by adding an actual 3-dimensional geometric sculpture in space, that added complexity to her installation. Jurors Yvette Pino, Yeonhee Cheong, and Glowacki noted her highly sophisticated work, consistency of vision, and subtlety of color shifts, as well as the boldness of her recent installation.

In addition to the two Forward Art Prize recipients, Dane Arts is once again providing the five Forward Art Prize finalists with $1,000 unrestricted cash awards to the following artists: Sarah Getenhart Stankey, Angela Johnson, Heather Kohlmeier, Karolina Romanowski, and Sarah Stellino. Johnson and Stellino have both been Forward Art Prize finalists in previous years.

The Forward Art Prize and the Women Artists Forward Fund are both spin-offs of artist Brenda Baker and Bird Ross’s Being Forward social practice piece originally created in 2017, that playfully addresses and works to rectify the historic inequities in representation of art created by women. Being Forward and the Forward Art Prize come at a time when museums and communities across the globe are working to change the status quo by buying and showing more work by women artists and addressing gender equity in their shows and collections. “We have terrific support from the Dane County arts and philanthropic communities, who recognize the value of supporting women artists in our community”, says Women Artists Forward Fund Co-Founder Brenda Baker. “We’re thrilled to help further elevate the conversation about equity in the arts, while bringing about meaningful change.”