Wyoming Arts Council

Announcing the 2017 Visual Arts Fellowship Recipients

Featured News | August 30, 2017

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The Wyoming Arts Council is pleased to announce the recipients of this year’s Visual Arts Fellowships. The Visual Arts Fellowships are awarded to Wyoming artists based on the merit of their portfolio and whose work reflects serious and exceptional aesthetic investigation. The fellowships are open to Wyoming artists working in any visual medium. Recipients each receive a $3,000 award and will participate in a Biennial Fellowship Exhibition in 2019.  The fellowship recipients are:

Margaret K. Haydon
Margaret Haydon earned her MFA in ceramics in 1989 from San Francisco State University. She is currently Professor of Ceramics at the University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming. Haydon is fascinated by ongoing changes in habitat and species demographics brought about by the current environmental predicament. Combining her aesthetic work with field-work, she has worked with fish biologists and naturalists in the United States, Canada and Hungary. Her work is exhibited frequently around the country and internationally. In July 2013, Haydon gave a paper at the 7th International Symposium on Sturgeon, held in Nanaimo, BC, Canada. She organized and curated the exhibition, In the Company of Animals, which was installed in Kansas City at the Leopold Gallery, during the 2016 NCECA conference. In January 2017 her work was featured at the Loveland Art Museum in Loveland, Colorado in an exhibition titled Circling. In August 2017, her work was also included in Fabricating Nature, an exhibition at the William Havu Gallery in Denver, Colorado.

Patrick Kikut
Patrick Kikut was raised in a small beach town in Southern California. He earned a BFA from University of Colorado in 1990 and went on to earn an MFA in 1994 from the University of Montana. Currently he is living in Laramie Wyoming, painting and teaching at the University of Wyoming.

Kikut’s artistic research is comprised of painting, drawings and site-specific work that are based on personal experiences, myths, and history that have been played out on the Western landscape. The highways, prairies, wide open sage country, and expansive deserts often strike Kikut as empty stages-sets where the actors have vanished and what is left with is the residue of human actions. His paintings reflect a Western landscape and culture while acknowledging the fact that it is in the process of being radically transformed by climate changes and our economic needs.

Robert Martinez
Robert Martinez was born on the Wind River Reservation in Riverton Wyoming. He attended Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design, in Denver CO, and he graduated at age 19, becoming the Youngest Native American to graduate at that time.

His Northern Arapaho heritage remains a constant inspiration and source of ideas for his work.  Living in Wyoming amongst the hard working people of the west and experiencing their issues also influence his creations.  The past and present often resonate strongly throughout his work. Much of Robert’s current work uses the historical imagery, myth’s and stories of the West & Arapaho Culture to create images that have a statement on the issues of today. Using a strong contrast in of lights, darks, and painting in intense vibrant color, he creates striking imagery that is confronting and engages the viewer.

Honorable mentions are Ashley Hope Carlisle (Laramie), Andy Kincaid (Jackson), and Rani Robison (Laramie).

For more information on this program, contact Rachel Clifton at (307) 777-5305 or rachel.clifton@wyo.gov.

 

 

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