ABOUT THE JURORS

An ecological artist and pro-activist who works with wetland issues from interdisciplinary backgrounds in anthropology, ethnographic film, and sculpture, Lillian Ball (American, b. 1955) believes that innovative artwork with stakeholders on conservation initiatives benefits wildlife, communities, and visitors. Her WATERWASH® public projects along the Bronx River and Mattituck Inlet combine native habitat restoration, stormwater remediation, and preservation. Ball’s documentary Sanctuary depicts efforts by a Buddhist monk to preserve native flora and fauna in Lumbini, Nepal, to protect the Sarus cranes nesting at Buddha’s birthplace, endangered by over-development. Ball exhibits and lectures at international institutions including at Kathmandu’s Taragaon Museum; Seville Biennale; and Reina Sofia, Madrid. Awards include NYFA Fellowships, Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and NEA grant.

Best known for his photographic books, Ralph Gibson (American, b. 1939) has published more than 40 monographs beginning with the landmark publication SOMNAMBULIST (1970). His images often incorporate erotic and mysterious undertones, building narrative meaning through contextualization and surreal juxtaposition. Recently, Gibson began to incorporate photographs and musical compositions into film and live performances at New York’s Roulette and The Stone, among other venues, and in 2010 he collaborated with Lou Reed on the film Red Shirley. Gibson’s work, featured in more than 170 museum collections worldwide, has been the subject of hundreds of solo exhibitions, including the retrospective Quartet at The High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2012). Awards include fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Leica Medal of Excellence, the Lucie Lifetime Award, and the Silver Plumb Award, Guild Hall Academy of the Arts Lifetime Artist Achievement Award (2015), and Palm Springs Fine Art Festival Photographer of the Year Award (2016). Gibson is a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France.

East Hampton and New York-based abstract painter Valerie Jaudon‘s (American, b. 1945) painterly yet rigorous and complex geometrical works have been exhibited worldwide for five decades. Originally part of the Pattern and Decoration movement, an aspect of the larger postminimalist trend, Jaudon explores the language, grammar, and forms of abstraction. Her work is widely collected and exhibited in museums in the United States and Europe, including The Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and National Gallery, Washington DC; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, and Humlebaeck, Denmark. Jaudon has created large-scale permanent public works for The Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; the Städel Museum, Frankfurt; Reagan National Airport, Washington DC; and the Manhattan Municipal Building and MTA Lexington Avenue Subway, 23rd Street, New York.

Jill Moser (American, b. 1956), best known for her strongly gestural paintings and prints, has explored painting, writing, and animated image for three decades. During the past 15 years, Moser has realized a wide range of collaborative projects with poets including Charles Bernstein and Major Jackson, and numerous print editions with Landfall Press, Brand X, and other publishers. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the United States and Europe, and is included in museum and public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; National Gallery of Art, DC; Yale University Art Museum; National Library of France, Paris; and Harvard’s Fogg Museum. Moser has taught at Princeton University and Virginia Commonwealth University, among others.

Painter Alexis Rockman (American, b. 1962) has depicted a darkly surreal vision of the collision between civilization and nature—often apocalyptic scenarios on a monumental scale—for more than three decades. He has been the subject of many international solo and group exhibitions, including a mid-career survey, Alexis Rockman A Fable for Tomorrow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC (2010) and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2011); East End Field Drawings at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, NY (2015); The Great Lakes Cycle, Grand Rapids Art Museum; Chicago Cultural Center; and Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis. His work is represented in public and private collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Brooklyn Museum, New York; and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. His forthcoming monograph, Alexis Rockman: Works on Paper, will be published by Damiani in 2020.

Best known for his process-based abstract works, Lucien Smith (American, b. 1989) employs both accidental and improvisational marks to create loose, all-over compositions. His series of Rain Paintings, made using paint-filled fire extinguishers, is considered a quintessential example of what critics dubbed Zombie Formalism during the early 2010s. Born in Los Angeles, CA, Smith attended Cooper Union School of Art and graduated with a BFA in 2011, and later worked as a studio assistant for the artist Dan Colen. Smith’s quick rise to success was initiated in part when Jeanne Greenberg-Rohatyn discovered his work while he was still in school, and gave him an exhibition at Salon 94. He has since shown with Skarstedt Gallery, Marianne Boesky Gallery, and Half Gallery in New York, among others. Forbes featured Smith in both its 2013 and 2014 list of “30 under 30” in the Art & Style category . The New York Times named him “the art world Wunderkind.” Smith lives and works in New York City and Montauk, NY.

Working in the fields of architecture, design, and fine art, Allan Wexler (American, b. 1949) focuses his work on the built environment, creating drawings, multimedia objects, images, and installations that alter perceptions of domestic activities. Acting as an investigator rather than searching for definitive solutions, Wexler creates buildings, furniture, vessels, and utensils as backdrops and props for everyday human activity such as eating, sleeping, and bathing. Absurd Thinking: Between Art and Design, a monograph on Wexler’s work, was recently published by Lars Müller. He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, a winner of a Chrysler Award for Design Innovation, George Nelson Design Award, and the Henry J. Leir Prize from the Jewish Museum. In 2016, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has exhibited and lectured internationally. He currently teaches in the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons the New School for Design in New York.

ABOUT THE SELECTED ARTISTS

Irina Alimanestianu’s (American, b. 1957) paintings have been shown in numerous exhibitions in Los Angeles and New York, and her writings on art and artists have been published in Art Issues and other magazines. She has a BFA from New York University, an MBA from Columbia University, and an MFA from Claremont Graduate University. Born in Nyack, NY, Alimanestianu was raised in the New York City as well as in Switzerland and France. She currently splits her time between New York, Los Angeles, and the East End.

Scott Bluedorn (American, b. 1986) is an artist, illustrator, and designer working in various media including painting, drawing, print process, and found object assemblage. Inspired by cultural anthropology, primitivism, and nautical tradition, Bluedorn distills imagery that speaks to the collective unconscious, particularly through myth and visual story-telling—a world he refers to as “maritime cosmology.” Bluedorn, who earned a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2009, lives and works in East Hampton, NY.

Mary Boochever’s (American, b. 1954) painting, sculpture, and installations draw the viewer into the immediacy of the color experience. In developing her own color language, the artist has explored sources as diverse as the Kabala and Goethe’s Color Theory. Born into a Washington, D.C. Foreign Service family, Boochever later studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich. She has taught at the School of Visual Arts, Suffolk Community College in Riverhead, and Lacoste School of the Arts in France, and has guest-lectured at Yale University. The artist moved to Long Island in 1993 and currently lives and works in Sag Harbor.

Through her extensive travels to experience the planet, Janet Culbertson (American, b. 1932) has painted the dark volcanic islands of the Galapagos, the fierce beauty of the Grand Canyon, the vanishing animals of Africa, and the degradation of the earth’s once wild places. Raised in Western Pennsylvania, Culbertson attended Carnegie Mellon University and moved to New York City in 1954 where she earned a Master’s degree from N.Y.U. She has taught painting at Pace University and Pratt Art Institute, and currently lives and works on Shelter Island, NY.

Margaret Garrett’s (American, b. 1965) painting practice is largely influenced by her background as a dancer. Born in North Carolina and raised in Pennsylvania, she began studying dance as a child and was a member of professional dance companies through her teenage and early adult years. Garrett’s work is included in the collections of the Parrish Art Museum and Guild Hall Museum on the East End of Long Island. The artist lives and works on Shelter Island, NY.

 Janet Goleas (American, b. 1956) spent most of her formative years in Germany which afforded her a broad view of life and art. She relocated from Europe to California to pursue her art and received a BFA and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. A writer, educator and curator, Goleas focuses on what she describes as “…issues that are often in direct conflict with one another such as depth and flatness, nature and artifice, expression and precision, and spheres and circles.” Her work has been shown at the San Francisco Art Institute; Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery and Sierra Nevada Museum of Art, NV; Artists Space, NY; Guild Hall, Ashawagh Hall, Sara Nightingale Gallery, and Kathryn Markel Gallery, East Hampton; and Galerie Muhlenbusch-Winkelmann, Germany.

Priscilla Heine (American, b. 1956) studied at various institutions including the Arts Students League, Bennington College, Parsons School of Design at the New School, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Heine has shown her work consistently since earning her BFA from Tufts University in 1979, participating in solo and group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the School of Visual Arts, Emily Harvey Gallery, and Wally Findlay Galleries, NY; Heckscher Museum of Art and Islip Art Museum, Long Island, NY; Ashawagh Hall and Guild Hall, East Hampton; and Boston City Hall. Born and raised in New York City, she lives and works in East Hampton.

Ronald Reed (American, b. 1969) is a painter, sculptor, and architect who has spent the past three decades exploring the intersections and relationships between built and natural environments, contemplated design and irrational design, and their influences on the body politic and contemporary history. Born in Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho, he studied fine arts at Boise State University and architecture at the University of Idaho, where he received his Bachelor of Architecture in 1993. Reed lived and worked in New York from 1996 to 2018, at which time he relocated with his family to Sag Harbor.

Bastienne Schmidt (German, b. 1961) is a multi-media artist working with photography, painting, and large-scale drawings. Being the daughter of an archaeologist influenced her creative process and instilled a desire to organize, map, and understand systems through her artwork. Inspired by ancient Greek ceramics, Japanese woodcuts, fairytales, and American pop culture, her work often incorporates and transforms archetypal shapes. Schmidt’s work is included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography, NY; Brooklyn Museum; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Parrish Art Museum; the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, among others. Born in Germany and raised in Greece and Italy, she lives in New York and East Hampton.

Inspired by the seasons, tides, and marine and wildlife at the shore, Anne Seelbach’s (American, b. 1944) work explores the mysteries of nature where earth and water meet. The artist received a BA from NYU and an MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York. She has taught at the University of Rhode Island, Northeastern University and Emerson College in Boston, The Newark Museum, the Parrish Art Museum, and the Victor D’Amico Institute of Art. Seelbach lives and works in North Haven, NY.

Master printmaker, painter, educator and author Dan Welden (American, b. 1941) has been making prints and works on paper for over 50 years. His work has been shown in over 80 international solo exhibitions in museums and galleries and over 700 group exhibitions in the U.S., Europe, China, Japan, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, and Peru. Welden is represented in public and private collections nationwide including the Amity Art Foundation, Darien, CT; Baltimore Museum of Art; Portland Museum of Art; Temple University, Philadelphia; and Cape Cod Museum of Art, Dennis, MA, among many others. He lives and works in Sag Harbor, NY.

 Born in Tamworth, Australia, and raised in Sydney, Mark William Wilson (Australian, b. 1959) studied semiotics and photography at the Sydney College of the Arts before permanently relocating to the U.S. in 1982. He had a transcendent experience at the Metropolitan Museum of Art when he encountered Lucas Cranach’s The Judgment of Paris, which, for him, references the coalescence of the natural world, humanity, and the divine in its depiction of three unclothed goddesses in a natural setting. He currently lives in Springs and works in a former potato barn in East Hampton