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Five Minnesota Visual Artists Receive Jerome Fellowships 2008-09
Press Release from October 29, 2008.

Written By: Christina Schmid Constellation 03 9.19.09

Official Press Release, October 29, 2008

MINNEAPOLIS—The Minneapolis College of Art and Design is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2008–09 MCAD/Jerome Fellowships for Emerging Artists. They are Evan Baden, Barbara Claussen, Kirsten Peterson,
Benjamin Reed and Lindsay Smith. The MCAD/Jerome Fellowship Program provides each recipient with a $10,000
stipend and opportunities to discuss their work with nationally recognized art writers and museum professionals. The year-long fellowship culminates with an exhibition at the MCAD Gallery in the fall of 2009, which will be accompanied
by a catalog.

Evan Baden is a photographer whose haunting images describe technologyobsessed contemporary youth culture and lead us to question how technology is shaping our interactions. Baden received his BFA from the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul in 2007.

Barbara Claussen’s projects investigate conflicts occurring at the intersection of public and private space. Through public interventions, she brings local politics to light and creates a public dialogue between opposing points of view.
Claussen received her MFA from the University of Minnesota in 2001.

Also a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Minnesota, Kirsten Peterson is a painter interested in the construction and deconstruction of images. Using mixed media, she takes apart images of controlled destruProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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ion,
translating information between two and three dimensions and reinterpreting it through the lens of painting.

Benjamin Reed, who received his MFA from MCAD in 2008, is a sculptor and video installation artist whose work uses sports as framework for exploring themes of repetition, the pursuit of perfection and the distance between
audience and participant.

Lindsay Smith’s drawings offer us a dreamlike vision of how wasteful consumer culture interacts with nature, forming new landscapes where trash and trees coexist; our role in this synthetic wilderness is unclear. Smith received her BFA
from the University of Minnesota in 2007.

These five fellows were chosen from a group of 317 applicants by a jury composed of Paul Ha, director of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; Sara Krajewski, associate curator at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle; and Rob Silberman, associate professor of art history at the University of Minnesota. The MCAD/Jerome Foundation Fellowship Program is nationally recognized as an outstanding Twin Cities foundation-based grant program for visual artists. It was established in 1981 with the purpose of identifying and rewarding emerging visual artists across Minnesota who have not yet attained professional acknowledgment commensurate with the quality of their work. In its 27 years, the Jerome program has influenced the careers of more than 100
artists. Their work, in turn, has enriched the creative life of the region.