Three Houston artists receive Dallas Museum of Art grants
Do large museums have a responsibility to help support local artists?
The general opinion is yes. Just ask the Dallas Museum of Art.
The DMA announced last week that it will help support 13 emerging Texas artists this year through three annual programs: The Clare Hart DeGolyer Memorial Fund Award, which pays up to $1,500; the Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund Award, which pays up to $3,500; and the Otis and Velma Davis Dozier Travel Grant, which pays up to $6,000. This year’s awards will support the publication of art books and travel to art-book fairs, photography equipment, artist residencies, classes on glass-making techniques, studio space and video production.
Three Houston artists are among the winners, all of whom have recently mounted shows at Lawndale Art Center: Ryan Hawk, a filmmaker, sculptor, performer and installation artist who is currently a Core Program fellow at the Glassell School of Art, and recent Core fellow Yue Nakayama, also a filmmaker, both received Kimbrough Funds. Olaniyi Rasheed Akindiya won a travel grant to visit Cameroon and Ghana to study masquerade traditions.
Since 1980, the DMA’s Awards to Artists program has distributed nearly $800,000 to more than 300 recipients, many of whom have gone on to successful careers. Among the Houston artists who have benefited: Trenton Doyle Hancock, Robert Pruitt, Joseph Havel and Katrina Moorhead.
All of this year’s recipients are from Texas, including three from Dallas-Fort Worth and six from the Austin area. Kristen Gaylord, assistant curator of photographs at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, was the guest juror .
“We are thrilled to continue our support for some of the most promising and dynamic artists in our community with the Awards to Artists grants,” said Anna Katherine Brodbeck, the DMA’s senior curator of contemporary art. “We look forward to seeing how their probing, incisive work continues to rearticulate our understanding of themes including the body, gender, technology and rituals of belonging.”
Museums can help local artists in multiple ways, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston offers significant support through the Glassell School’s Block Program. (The Core residencies don’t really count as local; they are open to international talent.)
During its early years decades ago, the MFAH staged a local competition each year that awarded a purchase prize. The now legendary John Biggers, during his emerging artist phase, won in 1950 for “The Cradle,” a dramatic conte crayon drawing of a mother and child.
Though the MFAH has nothing on the scale of the Dallas awards, it does sponsor the biennial Citywide African American Artists Exhibition, a collaboration with the museum’s 5A advisory group that offers three prizes totaling $900. This year’s exhibition opens June 21 at the University Museum at Texas Southern and moves Aug. 16 to the Glassell School.