Ryan Hackett, an artist from Kensington, MD, was awarded the $25,000 2010 Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize last Saturday. Hackett, a 2009 finalist, is received his Bachelor of Arts in 1999 in studio art from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a Master of Fine Arts from San Francisco Art Institute in 2007.
In between his academic pursuits, he co-founded Decatur Blue, a Washington, D.C.-based artist collective. Decatur Blue looked to challenge the commercial constructs of the art world by serving simultaneously as curator, artist and gallery. Hackett's work has been featured recently in the solo exhibition
Interspecies Transmission at G Fine Art in Washington, D.C., in
the group show
Freaks Of Nature at the Bronx River Art Center in Bronx, New York, and as a 2009 Sondheim Prize finalist at The Baltimore Museum of Art.
He was the only finalist based outside of Baltimore.
The Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize is designed to assist visual artists in furthering their careers by awarding a fellowship to an artist or artist collaborators working in the Baltimore region.
The winner is determined by an outside panel of three jurors: Robert Nickas, an independent New York-based curator, writer and art critic, Magdalena Sawon
, owner and director of Postmasters Gallery in New York and
Hamza Walker
, director of education and associate curator of the Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago.
The Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize is held in conjunction with the annual Artscape juried exhibition and is produced by the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts. The finalists and semifinalists exhibitions are presented in partnership with The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) and Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).
Source: Baltimore Office of Promotions and the Arts
Writer: Walaika Haskins