Seniors headed for artwork careers get inaugural Grooms artwork award

Hannah Buchanan ’22 and Abigail Downs ’22 have won the inaugural Thomas B. Grooms Art Award, specified to college students who have “demonstrated innovative vision and ideas, as very well as the technological capability and talent to carry out these suggestions, and who have demonstrated a commitment to a occupation in the arts.”

The award was designed in honor of Grooms ’66, the retired director of structure excellence and the arts at the U.S. Standard Companies Administration, by his partner, Rodger Streitmatter. The levels of competition is open up to junior and senior art studio majors. Applicants submit a portfolio of their work. (Image left: Untitled earthenware clay sculpture by Abigail Downs.) 

Grooms “set it up quite smartly,” stated Meredith Brickell, affiliate professor and chair of artwork and artwork background. “The variety committee is produced up of studio artwork school and an exterior reviewer. This assures that our students’ perform, and DePauw a lot more normally, are witnessed by nationally recognized artists every yr.”

This year’s exterior juror was Josephine Halvorson, a painter, sculptor and printmaker and professor of art and chair of graduate research in painting at Boston University. She has been awarded several fellowships, including a single in 2021 from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Basis.

Halvorson said that Buchanan, a studio artwork important and artwork history and geology minimal from Rockville, Indiana, “infuses the genuine environment with creativity. Although her colours are not naturalistic, they belie close looking and capture the atmosphere of deep place or the emotional tenor of a room. I was notably struck by Hannah’s fearlessness to deal with any subject matter, close to or much, no make any difference how visually elaborate. Her ambition and sensitivity came by way of in equivalent evaluate.”

Halvorson reported that the multidisciplinary artwork by Downs, a studio art major from Bardstown, Kentucky, “includes painting, ceramics and pictures. Every piece exhibits a curiosity for both her medium and her subject matter. Certainly, it is the wide range of ways she normally takes that enables a spirit of discovery to glow via. There is a contact of humor in her function as perfectly. Abby displays excellent aptitude for inventive experimentation.”

Grooms and Streitmatter frequented the departmental awards ceremony Monday and ended up specified a tour of the Visible Arts Gallery by Buchanan and Downs.

As the GSA’s director of style excellence, Grooms was liable for deciding on architect and engineering groups to structure federal structures and approving their styles. He also managed the agency’s Art in Architecture program to commission American artists to create lasting installations of contemporary artwork for federal properties. He oversaw the GSA’s good arts selection of extra than 23,000 is effective dating from 1850 to the existing.

Grooms is the author of two guides: “The Majesty of Capitol Hill” and “World War II Memorial, Washington, D.C.”