Velocity receives 2010 Mayor’s Arts Award!
PRESS RELEASE
RELEASE DATE: June 8, 2010
Press contact:
Lori Patrick, Public Relations Manager
206-684-7306
lori.patrick@seattle.gov
Mayor announces 2010 Mayor’s Arts Award recipients
Recipients to be honored at Sept. 3 ceremony in conjunction with Bumbershoot Visual Arts Exhibits
SEATTLE — Mayor Mike McGinn today announced the recipients of the eighth annual 2010 Mayor’s Arts Awards.
“The Mayor’s Arts Awards shine a spotlight on the value of art and culture in our community and underscore the arts as vital to our quality of life in Seattle,” said McGinn. “This year’s award recipients represent inspiring accomplishments, reflect the diversity of arts and culture in our city and offer a universal language of understanding through the arts.”
The Seattle Arts Commission reviewed a record 459 public nominations and recommended six recipients to the mayor. The recipients of the 2010 Mayor’s Arts Award are:
- Juan Alonso, visual artist
- Book-It Repertory Theatre
- Dennis Coleman, artistic director, Seattle Men’s Chorus & Seattle Women’s Chorus
- Reel Grrls, nonprofit media production organization engaging young women
- Sergei Tschernisch, president, Cornish College of the Arts
- Velocity Dance Center
The recipients will be honored at the Mayor’s Arts Awards ceremony, noon, Friday, Sept. 3 at Seattle Center’s Northwest Court. The Mayor’s Arts Awards are presented in partnership with Bumbershoot®: Seattle’s Music & Arts Festival – celebrating the 40th Festival this year – and are sponsored by City Arts Seattle, a free monthly magazine discovering creativity throughout Seattle.
The outdoor ceremony, which is free and open to the public, will feature award presentations and the official opening of Bumbershoot’s Visual Arts Exhibits. The Festival’s Visual Arts Exhibits will open to the public a day early, with a free public preview from noon to 7 p.m. in celebration of the Mayor’s Arts Awards.
The 2010 Visual Arts Program features a 30-year look at Seattle alternative cartoonists and comics, a large-scale sculptural installation created from wooden coffee stir sticks, an exploration of the ways developments in art technology have resulted in new expressions of sound, a chance for Festival attendees to participate in a portrait challenge, and an opportunity to view the work of Seattle’s best street artists in a gallery setting. Bumbershoot’s Visual Arts Exhibits and the 2010 Fine Arts Poster are presented with support from the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs. To commemorate Bumbershoot’s 40th festival, Seattle artist Gregory Blackstock incorporated 40 Seattle icons into this year’s poster titled “40 Memorable Seattle Joys to Go For.”
The Mayor’s Arts Awards, which are nonmonetary, recognize the contributions made by artists, arts and cultural organizations and community members who make a difference through arts and cultural activities. To reflect the diversity of artistic achievement throughout the city, the awards do not have set categories.
For more information about the Mayor’s Arts Awards, including past recipients, visit http://www.seattle.gov/arts/community/arts_awards.asp
The Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs promotes the value of arts and culture in communities throughout Seattle. The 16-member Seattle Arts Commission, citizen volunteers appointed by the mayor and City Council, supports the city agency.
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2010 Mayor’s Arts Awards Bios
Juan Alonso
Growing up, Juan Alonso never had any intention of embarking on a career as a visual artist. Born in Havana, Cuba, Alonso arrived in the United States in 1966 as a boy. His father sent him to live with an aunt and uncle in Miami, Fla., in the hopes that Alonso would have a chance at a better life.
It was music that Juan first took up professionally, singing and playing guitar in Florida nightclubs in the late 1970s. He moved to Seattle in May of 1982, where his interest in painting and drawing flourished. Alonso’s artwork harkens to his homeland. His paintings draw on childhood memories
of Cuba and have evolved over the years from his trademark sensuous floral works to weathered
abstractions inspired by the faded facades of Havana’s ornate, historic buildings and currently focus on the foundation and inner workings of architectural structures.
Since his inclusion in a group show of Latin-American artists in 1986 at Seattle Center, what started out as a strong interest in the visual arts, became a lifetime commitment. This commitment is not exclusive to his career, however. Alonso promotes and mentors other artists, advocates for minority artists, is very involved with several arts organizations and spearheads fundraising efforts for various community causes.
Alonso’s work has been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the United States, Canada and Latin America. He received a Neddy Fellowship in 1997 and the Morrie and Joan Alhadeff PONCHO Artist of the Year Award in 2007. His work is in public collections, including the city of Seattle, state of Oregon, Washington state’s art in public places program, city of Everett, IMG Inc. in Tokyo, Microsoft, Safeco, AIDS Housing of Washington, Museum of Northwest Art and the Tacoma Art Museum. He has completed public art commissions for Qwest Field, Sea-Tac Airport, the King County Housing Authority’s Greenbridge Neighborhood Park and Sound Transit’s Columbia City light rail station.
Book-It Repertory Theatre
Book-It Repertory Theatre celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. The nonprofit organization is dedicated to transforming great literature into great theatre and to inspiring its audiences to read.
The seeds for Book-It were sown in 1987, when a group of Seattle actors gathered at a Capitol Hill acting studio in the hopes of launching a troupe devoted to bringing literature to life on stage. The theater began as an artists’ collective adapting short stories for performances and touring them throughout the Northwest. A few years later in 1990, Book-It Repertory Theatre was born.
Book-It’s trademarked style preserves the narrative text as it is spoken, not by a single “narrator” but as active dialogue by the characters in the production. The company’s spare production aesthetic serves the adapted literature by mirroring the reading experience, inviting the audience to participate fully with their imaginations.
Today, in addition to offering four to five fully-produced theatrical productions each season, education plays an integral role in Book-It’s work. Book-It All Over, the theater’s educational touring program, aims to improve reading and writing skills by making a visceral connection between the written and the spoken word. Its four annual touring performances and school residencies reach more than 60,000 young people every year by travelling to schools, libraries, and community centers around the state.
Under the leadership of Founding Co-Artistic Directors Jane Jones and Myra Platt, Book-It has produced more than 60 world-premiere adaptations of classic and contemporary literature for the stage. The company has carved out a unique niche in Seattle’s theater community.
Over the years, Book-It has formed relationships with many great living authors whose works they have adapted, including John Irving, Tom Robbins, Amy Bloom, David Guterson, Maya Angelou, Jim Lynch, Stephanie Kallos, Pam Houston, Isabel Allende, Jonathan Raban, Ivan Doig and Dinaw Mengestu.
Dennis Coleman
Dennis Coleman has been a leader in Seattle’s LGBT and arts communities for nearly three decades. His commitment to using the arts to achieve social justice goals has been a driving force in his life.
He is best known for his work as artistic director (since 1981) of Seattle Men’s Chorus (SMC), having led the Chorus to a position of prominence as the largest community chorus (in audience and budget size) in the United Sates. Seattle Men’s Chorus, founded in 1979, is the largest gay men’s chorus in the world, with more than 300 singing members. The Chorus, on the occasion of its 30th anniversary season, has built bridges of understanding through the “power of music, touching hearts and changing minds.” It performs to more than 20,000 patrons annually and has performed in many of the world’s most prestigious halls, including New York’s Carnegie Hall and Barcelona’s Palau de Musica Catalon.
In 2002, Coleman became founding artistic director of Seattle Women’s Chorus (SWC). Since its inception, SWC has grown to more than 250 members. The diverse membership of SWC provides a model by which lesbian and straight women work together toward a common mission and vision of acceptance.
Coleman has been active as a civic leader in Seattle. He initiated and continues to direct the downtown Westlake Christmas Tree Lighting Celebration, was the music director of Seattle’s Goodwill Games, and served on the advisory board guiding the design of Benaroya Hall. The Pride Foundation created a scholarship fund in his name to provide funding to LGBT students pursuing a degree in music.
Reel Grrls
Founded in 2001 by Malory Graham, Reel Grrls is an award-winning program devoted to empowering young women through media production.
Reel Grrls’ mission is to cultivate voice and leadership in girls at a vulnerable time in their development. The participants don’t just drop into a computer lab after school — they develop lasting relationships with women filmmakers and learn skills that propel them to leadership roles in their community, college scholarships and careers in the media industry. More than 60 percent of participants, many of whom are low income and at-risk teens, receive scholarships.
Reel Grrls offers a variety of hands-on workshops in specific skills including animation, cinematography, script writing and more. The organization offers day camps, weekend and after-school workshops, and an apprenticeship program in which advanced students provide professional video production services to Seattle-area nonprofits.
In addition to providing young women with access to resources that allow them to create meaningful films, Reel Grrls helps teens showcase their work at festivals and local public screenings. Reel Grrls films have been screened and honored at more than 80 film festivals in the United States and abroad. Recent highlights include winning two Student Emmys from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and official selections in the Los Angeles Film Festival, the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Langston Hughes African American Film Festival and the Seattle International Film Festivals.
For the past two years, Team Reel Grrls, a group of 10 Seattle-area women filmmakers who also serve as Reel Grrls mentors and staff, have received top honors in the International Documentary Challenge. In 2008, Team Reel Grrls won best film out of a pool of 150 international contestants and took home two 2009 jury awards, including best editing.
Sergei Tschernisch
Sergei Tschernisch, president of Seattle’s Cornish College of the Arts, is a dynamic and respected arts educator. Tschernisch assumed his Cornish job in 1994 and has significantly expanded the campus, enrollment and reputation of the private college that focuses on degree programs in the visual and performing arts. He will retire from his post at the end of the 2010-11 academic year.
Tschernisch boldly instigated and presided over a period of remarkable expansion of Cornish. Enrollment has grown from 500 students in 1994 to about 800 in 2010. And the school’s big plans to add and modernize facilities were realized, despite limited dollars.
Tschernisch has orchestrated a Cornish renaissance. Under his leadership, the school has achieved yearly balanced budgets, key faculty and staff appointments, curricular changes and new programs. The transformations are most dramatically apparent with the relocation and expansion of the campus from Capitol Hill to the Denny Triangle/South Lake Union area in downtown.
He served three terms on the Seattle Arts Commission and played an integral role in advancing the commission’s commitment to arts education in Seattle Public Schools.
Tschernisch is an artist, educator and administrator whose professional career includes initiating and shaping some of the country’s most progressive arts programs, including a 12-year tenure at CalArts and work at regional theaters in Boston, New York, Seattle and Los Angeles. His vision and energy has enabled Cornish to expand beyond Seattle and take its place as the premier visual and performing arts college of the Northwest.
His vision and energy carry on the legacy of Cornish – since its founding in 1914 – to serve as an incubator for emerging artists and offer them a deep grounding in the skills of their profession (dance, music, theater, visual art) and the personal confidence and determination to succeed.
Velocity Dance Center
Seattle has one of the most active dance communities on the West Coast. It is home to dozens of independent choreographers and is renowned for producing innovative, cutting-edge work. Velocity Dance Center embodies the cornerstone of Seattle’s dance ecosystem and contributes significantly to the national and international field of dance. It’s Seattle’s only dedicatedcontemporary dance venue where groundbreaking work and disciplined practice coexist.
Launched in 1996 by dancer/choreographers KT Niehoff and Michele Miller, Velocity quickly grew into a vital force alongside the Seattle dance community. It offers a full schedule of classes for beginner through professional-level dancers, eight artist development programs, and affordable rehearsal and performance space to local dance companies and choreographers.
Velocity is also home to the hugely popular Strictly Seattle, a three-week summer intensive that draws dancers from all over the country to participate in three weeks of classes and workshops taught by Seattle-based choreographers and culminating in public performances.
In 2006, Niehoff and Miller stepped down, and Kara O’Toole took over as executive director of the contemporary dance studio, where the founders remain active as teachers and mentors.
In 2007, Velocity’s former home in the Odd Fellows Building on Capitol Hill was sold to a developer who raised the rent, making it impossible for the organization to remain in the space. So, under the leadership of O’Toole, Velocity launched a capital campaign to raise funds to relocate to and renovate a space just around the corner at 1621 12th Avenue. The organization moved into its new home in March 2010.
Velocity Dance Center has over 15,000 site visits a year. It serves at least 5,000 individuals: including 3,000 adult students, 100 dance companies and individual artists, and the majority of Seattle’s leading contemporary choreographers. Velocity maintains an audience of approximately 2,000 dance enthusiasts and keeps Seattle squarely on the contemporary dance map.
