Category: Foundation News

(left) Sarah Rosalena (right) Aaron Spangler

The Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2022 awards. The Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Art Prize will be awarded to Sarah Rosalena. The Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Minnesota Art Prize will be awarded to Aaron Spangler. Both prizes include exhibition projects at the Ojai Institute in Ojai, the artist centric initiative of the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation. Spangler is a critical partner, and source of inspiration, as the foundation embarks on a new residency exchange partnership with the Nemeth Art Center based in Park Rapids, Minnesota. 

The Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Art Prize consists of an unrestricted gift of $10,000. Previous prize recipients include 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 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.

Tables and tickets are now available! Purchase your table or ticket online here or by contacting Frederick Janka, Executive Director, [email protected] or 646.334.1006.

Artist Biographies:

Sarah Rosalena (Wixárika, b. 1982, Los Angeles) is Assistant Professor of Art at UC Santa Barbara in Computational Craft and Haptic Media. Her work deconstructs technology with material interventions, creating new narratives for hybrid objects that function between human/nonhuman, ancient/future, handmade/autonomous to override power structures rooted in colonialism. She was recently given Creative Capital, the LACMA Art + Tech Lab Grant, the Steve Wilson Award from Leonardo, the International Society for Art, Sciences, and Technology, and the Craft Futures Grant from Center for Craft. Her research focuses on Indigenous scholarship and mentorship in STEAM. She has presented her work and research at places such as LACMA, Blum & Poe Gallery, Frieze LA, New Wight Gallery, and Ars Electronica. Upcoming solo exhibitions include LACMA/Mount Wilson Observatory and Clockshop. Her work is in the permanent collection at LACMA.

Aaron Spangler (b. 1971, Minneapolis) is a sculptor and printmaker best known for his monumental, monochromatic carved wooden sculptures and for resuscitating and contemporizing the traditional art of bas relief. His themes emerge from his roots in a heavily forested area of northern Minnesota, and began in darkly calamitous, intricately carved wood bas relief. Painted black with gesso and rubbed with graphite, the surfaces appear to be machined, the surrealistic scenes–of twisted tree roots, limbs, and extinct hand tools–illustrating, or presaging, various breakdowns of rural society. Since moving back home to his house and studio in the Two Inlets Forest in Minnesota in 2009, his work has grown in a more smoothly abstracted, heavily patterned, and intimate direction. In bas relief, freestanding sculpture, and woodblock and hand-rubbed prints, he continues to explore and provoke the ineffable truths and mythologies of the rural ethos. 

Since 1998 Spangler’s work has been the subject of many national and international exhibitions, including solo shows in galleries in New York and Berlin. In recent years he’s been included in group shows such as “Working Thought,” The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Takashi Murakami’s “Superflat Collection,” Yokohama, Japan; the two-person “American Gothic” at Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (with Alison Elizabeth Taylor), Winston-Salem, N.C.; “Spectacular of Vernacular” (2011–12), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; “Heartland” (2008–10), Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands; and the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. His work belongs to many public and private collections, including The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hammer Museum, and the Rubell Family Collection, among others.  He has received grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2014), McKnight Foundation (2009), Minnesota State Arts Board (1998), and Jerome Foundation (1997). In 2017, Spangler’s first large-scale bronze, Bog Walker, was commissioned by Walker Art Center for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.

Spangler lives with his wife, writer Amy Thielen, and their son, just outside their hometown of Park Rapids, Minnesota. In a volunteer capacity, Spangler advises and curates exhibitions for the Nemeth Art Center, a contemporary art center housed in the historic Hubbard County courthouse.