BALTIMORE’S BAKER AWARD WINNERS ANNOUNCED
A violist, a sculptor, and a film animator walked away yesterday with top prizes in the 2010 Baker Awards—among the most prestigious and lucrative awards given to individual artists living and working in the Baltimore region, notes the Baltimore Sun.
The three twenty-five-thousand-dollar-prize winners were Peter Minkler, forty-nine, a musician with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra who has released a CD of solo works for the viola; Richard Cleaver, fifty-seven, a sculptor who crafts intricate, bejeweled, and intentionally primitive tableaux; and Karen Yasinsky, forty-four, a film animator who controls every aspect of her creations, down to building the ceramic “actors” used in her videos.
The three top prizes, and the five one-thousand-dollar Baltimore’s Choice Awards, were announced Wednesday night on Maryland Public Television’s ArtWorks This Week show, hosted by Rhea Feikin.
Yasinsky, who teaches at Maryland Institute College of Art and the Johns Hopkins University, might use the prize to create her own website—a must for an artist whose films are shown primarily at festivals. “I might also buy my own camera,” she says. “Now I have to borrow one.”
Cleaver creates sculptures from such materials as gold leaf and semiprecious gems. His work is owned by the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington and San Francisco’s deYoung Museum. He says the award will help tide him over as the country recovers from the recession.
