THE ALBERTA AWARDS 2004
Last year on November 7th, 2004 the Alberta duPont Bonsal Foundation held its annual Gala Dinner and Silent Auction at the elegant home of Vivian Lim and Joe Wong in La Jolla, CA. The evening recognized the 2004 Recipients of Art and Poetry.
The 2004 Alberta Prize Recipient for Art is Kelly Nipper. Nipper employs photography and video to create conceptual, yet poetic work that deals with the experience of time and movement. For Nipper's award the foundation donated Nippers four channel video installation, Bending Water into a Heart Shape, to the Orange County Museum of Art.
The 2004 Alberta Prize Recipient for Poetry is Sasha Steensen. Her winning manuscript, A Magic Book, was published and released in November 2004 by Fence Books. A Magic Book offers an alternative history and alternative myths of the founding of the United States of America.
POETRY NEWS: LAURA SIMS is the winner of the 2005 Fence Books Alberta Prize. Her manuscript Practice, Restraint will be published by Fence Books in November. From literary journals to online poetry blogs, talk and excitement about this book have been building since the selection was announced last spring. In the October issue, Poets & Writers magazine features Laura as one of “Eighteen Debut Poets who Made Their Mark in 2005.” MacArthur Genius Grant-winning poet, C. D. Wright cheers of the book that, “The poems shine.” In 2004, Laura was awarded First Prize in the Summer Literary Seminars writing contest, which provided her a month’s stay in St. Petersburg, Russia. Just this month she has been awarded a coveted grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to live and work in Japan. She currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she teaches creative writing and composition.
Laura writes, "Thank you so much for picking Practice, Restraint this year! I'm THRILLED. I really can't imagine a better way to have my first book published -- on Fence Books, with the Alberta Prize! It's unbelievable."
ART NEWS: The Alberta duPont Bonsal Foundation is in the final stages
of its selection process. Work under consideration includes San Diego State University nominee, Claudette Schreuders.
The extraordinary South African artist Claudette Schreuders is a woodcarver, creating painted wooden figures that reflect the ambiguities of the search for an African identity, in the post-apartheid 21st century. The blolo and colon figures of West Africa, medieval church sculpture, Spanish portraiture, and Egyptian woodcarving are influences reflected in her work.
The Long Day, a fall 2004 sculpture exhibit at SDSU, was Claudette's first major solo exhibition in the United States. For this exhibition, Schreuders created eleven new carved and painted wood sculptures, a series of eight lithographs and a series of four etchings.