(left) Janna Ireland, portrait by Carlos Jaramillo (right) Cameron Patricia Downey
The Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2023 awards. The Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Art Prize will be awarded to Janna Ireland. The Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Minnesota Art Prize will be awarded to Cameron Patricia Downey.
Downey will present a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB) opening September 17, 2023. This will be their debut institutional exhibition. Their collaborative video work Hymn of Dust, with Ize Commers, M Jamison, Cooper Felien, will have its West Coast debut January 22 – March 29, 2023 also at MCASB.
Both artists will be feted at the annual Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Annual Art Prize Gala on May 20, 2023. Tickets and tables will be available shortly. Save the date for the Art Prize Gala Weekend, May 19-21, 2023.
The Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Art Prize consists of an unrestricted gift of $10,000. Previous prize recipients include Sarah Rosalena Brady (2022), Porfirio Gutiérrez (2021), Tanya Aguiñiga (2020), Kelly Akashi (2019), Ry Rocklen (2018), and Rob Fischer (2017). The prize is awarded on an annual basis and the current focus is on supporting artists living in Southern California.
The Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Minnesota Art Prize consists of an unrestricted gift of $5,000. Previous prize recipients include Aaron Spangler (2022) Jovan C. Speller (2021), and Dyani White Hawk (2020). The prize is awarded on an annual basis and the current focus is on supporting artists living in Minnesota.
Artist Biographies:
Janna Ireland lives in Los Angeles, where she is an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Occidental College. Her photographic work is primarily concerned with the themes of family, home, and the expression of Black identity in American culture. In 2016, she began photographing structures designed by legendary Black architect Paul R. Williams. A collection of 250 of these photographs was published in a monograph entitled Regarding Paul R. Williams: A Photographer’s View, in 2020. In 2021, Ireland was awarded a Peter E. Pool Research Fellowship by the Nevada Museum of Art to photograph Williams’ work in Nevada. A solo exhibition of this work opened at the Nevada Museum of Art in 2022 and traveled to the Nevada State Museum in Las Vegas, where it will be on view until May 30, 2023.
A broad selection of Ireland’s work was included in the exhibition “Family Album: Dannielle Bowman, Janna Ireland and Contemporary Works from LACMA” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Charles White Elementary School Gallery. Ireland’s photographs are held in the permanent collections of institutions including LACMA, the Nevada Museum of Art, the California African American Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. Her work has been the subject of articles in publications including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Harvard Design Magazine, and Aperture. She holds an MFA from the UCLA Department of Art and a BFA from the Department of Photography and Imaging at NYU.
Cameron Patricia Downey (b. 1998) is an anti-disciplinary artist born and raised in North Minneapolis, Minnesota. Their work oscillates between photography, film, body, sculpture, curation and otherwise — seeing instruction in the incidental, the precarious, the misremembered and the banal. Their work strives to archive, unfurl, make-altar-of and bring fantasy to the Blues of Black life and relation.
Downey graduated from Columbia University in 2021 with a double concentration in visual art and environmental science. Downey’s art has been exhibited by HAIR+NAILS in: HAIR+NAILS at 9 Herkimer (Brooklyn, 2019), FUTURE FUTURE (2020), “The Human Scale” at Rochester Art Center (2021), and in their first solo show “Three Things Last Forever” (2020). Downey will present their next solo show of new work at HAIR+NAILS in spring 2023 as well as at Midway Contemporary Art in fall of 2023. Downey guest curated HOLDING SPACE, an exhibition of video, image, light and sound, in the H+N front yard (summer 2020). Downey’s recent exhibitions and screenings have included those at the Walker Art Center (2022), “Wild Frictions” at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien in Berlin (2021), “Intersections” at Engage Projects in Chicago (2021–2022) and “In The River” as part of Midway Contemporary Art’s Off-Site program (2022). Downey is currently an artist in residence at the Walker Art Center’s mediatheque and at Second Shift Studio Space of St. Paul.