The Ellis Beauregard Foundation, Rockland, Maine, is pleased to announce the 2023 Fellowship Awardee in the Visual Arts, Carlie Trosclair from New Orleans, Louisiana. This is the first year the Foundation has offered the award at the $50,000.00 level and received over 300 applications from across the country. The jurors were: Carol Eliel, Curator of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Jessica May, Managing Director, Art and Exhibitions and Artistic Director DeCordova Sculpture Park ad Museum, Boston, MA and Alison DeLima Greene, Isabel Brown Wilson Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Tx. After a rigorous review and a spirited discussion, all three jurors selected Trosclair’s work, noting its pertinence to the issues of the day as well as its sheer haunting beauty reflects Donna McNeil, Founding Executive Director, Ellis-Beauregard Foundation. The award is paired with a solo exhibit at the Center For Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, Maine and we hope bringing this impactful work to Maine will inspire all who see it.

Carlie Trosclair writes This level of financial support is an anchor that provides the security needed to dream beyond the scope of what’s right in front of me. At a minimum, my next few years just expanded with possibility. I am so grateful to the Ellis Beauregard Foundation for the gift to imagine new works without limitation (AND afford to store them afterward). I’m floating.

Carol Eliel, curator, LACMA adds, Carlie Trosclair’s work reflects her roots in New Orleans but speaks more broadly to human vulnerability. She has developed a distinctive vocabulary, translating robust architecture into thin latex skins and ghostlike forms. At the same time that they evoke the perils facing humanity, Trosclair’s sculptures are exquisitely beautiful and suggest the importance of taking care, both of others and ourselves. Juror Jessica May, Vice President, Art and Exhibitions, The Trustees Artistic Director, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum found this work to be vibrantly attuned to this moment, both specific in its cultural references and profoundly universal. As climate change literally comes home for people around the globe, artists like Carlie Trosclair, whose work evokes the spaces of our lives with emotional and poetic depth, are more important than ever.” Further, juror Alison DeLima Green, Museum of Fine Art, Houston, expounds, It is a profound pleasure and privilege to be a part of the Ellis-Beauregard’s ongoing engagement with contemporary art and to recognize Carlie Trosclair with this year’s Fellowship award. Her work immediately commanded our admiration for its fusion of historical memory and present urgencies as she addresses climate change and the precariousness of our built environments. A native of New Orleans, Trosclair has grounded her work in personal experience, as she came of age in the face of rising waters, and her sculptures and installations eloquently capture how that city’s urban fabric is under constant threat. However, we also took into account that as her practice has expanded, she has proved to bring an exceptional sensitivity to the conditions of other sites across America and we look forward to seeing where she takes her work in the year to come.

The Ellis-Beauregard Foundation is pleased to announce the $25,000 Visual Arts Fellowship awardee for 2022. This is the first year the award has become national and the first year it is accompanied by a $5000.00 shipping stipend to bring the work to a solo exhibit at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland.

Arnold J. Kemp lives and works in Chicago. Recent exhibitions of the artist’s work include FALSE HYDRAS (2021) at JOAN in Los Angeles and I COULD SURVIVE, I WOULD SURVIVE, I SHOULD SURVIVE (2021) at Manetti Shrem Art Museum at the University of California at Davis, and LESS LIKE AND OBJECT AND MORE LIKE THE WEATHER at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Research, University of Chicago. Over the past decade, Kemp received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. Kemp’s works are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Portland Art Museum, the Schneider Museum of Art, and the Tacoma Art Museum. Kemp received a BA/BFA degree in Studio Art and English Literature from Tufts University in 1991 and an MFA degree in 2005 from Stanford University.

The Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, Rockland Maine awarded Nancy Andrews of Mount Desert Island it’s  $25,000.00 award for a Maine artist working in the visual arts.  

Three jurors: Ian, Alteveer, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ellen Tani, an art historian, curator, and critic based in Washington, DC, and Danielle Jackson, a critic, researcher, arts administrator and the co-founder and former co-director of the Bronx Documentary Center were unanimous in their decision. Ian Alteveer states:”It was thrilling to review the work of so many talented Maine-based artists with such expansive and diverse practices. The work of Nancy Andrews made a deep impression on the jury. Her personal yet kaleidoscopic practice, across many media, centers narratives of trauma and discovery while  inventing countless new possibilities for looking at the world.” Ellen Tani adds, “Nancy’s work offers a kaleidoscopic perspective that takes us from the fantastical world of the curio shop and science fiction to the lived, corporeal experiences of medical emergency, alterity, and delirium. She probes the factual and fictional  boundaries of the human and the animal realms with an elevated acumen for editing and animation style.”

Veronica is from Westbrook, Maine. Her work can be found at veronicaaperez.com.

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Artist, educator, and activist Erin Johnson is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Digital Media with a joint appointment in the Visual Arts Department and the Digital and Computational Studies Program at Bowdoin College. In 2013, she earned an MFA in Art Practice and a Certificate in New Media from U.C. Berkeley. She makes interdisciplinary, collaborative projects that blend documentary, experimental, and narrative practices to explore social, political, and geographical imaginaries.

www.erinjohnson.online