2012 Distinguished Achievement Award Winners

Presented by

Peter and Madeleine Martin Foundation for The Creative Arts

Following last  year's successful award series, the Taos Fall Arts festival board is delighted to announce the Distinguished Achievement Awards for 2012.

• Mary Shaffer will receive the Beatrice Mandelman-Melissa Zink Award for mixed media
• Mimi Chen Ting will receive the Agnes Martin Award for abstract painting and drawing
• Rachel Brown will be awarded, through her family, the Joan Loveless-Rachel Brown Award for fiber and textiles

The Distinguished Achievement Award Series was established in 2011, in an effort to connect the well-known artistic past of Taos, with the exciting contemporary artwork currently done here. Many visitors to Taos are aware of its deep connection to the arts and know about art from Taos Pueblo and by the Taos Moderns. In an effort to link Taos' historic artistic legacy, to its thriving contemporary art scene. For information about attending the event and purchasing tickets visit this link.

The DAAwards are curated by an art professional independent of the Taos Fall Arts Festival board. Last year’s awards were funded by the Peter and Madelaine Martin Foundation for the Creative Arts. These awards are named for past artists in broad areas/fields. They are awarded to established contemporary artists who live and work in Taos, whose careers reach well beyond the boundaries of Taos, and whose commitment to art is exemplary. 

There are awards in 12 areas/fields and each year three artists are selected in different fields. After four years, all areaswill have been awarded and the awards will return to the first three areas, when new artists will be awarded. Each recipient received a plaque and a cash award at the preview event immediately preceding the fall arts opening. 

Charles Strong curated the first awards in 2011. Julian Robles received the Blumenschein/Couse Award for figurative and landscape painting and drawing.  Phil Poirier received the Tony Reyna Award for jewelry and G. Victor Goler received the Santo Nino Santero/Ted Egri Award for sculpture. 

This year Jina Brennaman, the curator of the Harwood Museum, has selected the 2012 awardees.  This year’s award winners are, Rachel Brown, Mimi Chen Ting, and Mary Shaffer.

Rachel Brown	Mary Shaffer	Mimi Chen Ting

 

~  Shaffer is a sculptor and glass artist who started out as a painter, studying at the Rhode Island School of Design. She lived in Rhode Island for fifteen years, teaching sculpture at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston and painting at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. In the late 60’s, she and her husband Hardu Keck ran the Rhode Island School of Design European Honors Program in Rome. In Italy, as a young artist enthralled by light, Shaffer began exhibiting her paintings of windows and window light, but found canvas to be too flat, opaque and unyielding a surface. 

  ~When Rachel Brown moved to Taos in 1956, she came with a solid art background from years of study at Radcliff College, Harvard Graduate School of Design, and New York’s Art Students League and Cooper Union. Although trained in architecture, painting, drawing and design, the beauty and designs of the Rio Grande and Navajo rugs she discovered in New Mexico provided a new creative focus. Working in this medium with its “magical twisting of glossy fibers and intertwining them with the warp” provided Rachel with a satisfying art form. Out of necessity she learned to spin and dye her yarns. From that time on she could only weave using the extensive palette of hand-dyed colors she developed. Rachel created Rio Grande Weavers Supply, a place where weavers could go to find a huge array of hand-dyed yarns, weaving supplies and looms. This eventually grew to encompass Weaving Southwest, established in 1987 as a space for local contemporary tapestry artists to display and sell their work. To share her enthusiasm for the medium and her experience with the art form, Rachel wrote and published The Weaving, Spinning and Dying Book in 1978. By that time her tapestries had been exhibited throughout the Southwest and in New York and Washington D.C. and placed in public and private collections in U.S., Canada, and Europe. In 1993 the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D. C. recognized Rachel Brown’s work with a Life Time Achievement Award. Rachel Brown died earlier this year.