Celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the Twining Humber Award – Recipients Spotlight
In celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Twining Humber Award, here is a slideshow of all the Twining Humber recipients over the last 20 years! Below is a list of each recipient.
Music by Ahamefule Oluo.
Also check out this conversation between Claudia Bach and 2013 Twining Humber recipient Norie Sato.
2021
DEBORA MOORE was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Moore started working in glass in the late 1980s at Pratt Fine Arts Center. Moore served as instructor at Pratt, the Hilltop Glass Program in Tacoma, and the Pilchuck Glass School. In 2005, Moore was artist-in-residence at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma and the Abate Zanetti in Murano, Italy. The Corning Museum of Glass awarded Moore the 2007 Rakow Commission.
Moore has had one-person exhibitions at four Northwest museums as well as the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk and Imagine Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. Her most recent body of work Arboria debuted at Tacoma Art Museum in 2019 and was shown in the Smithsonian’s Renwick Invitational 2020.
Her sculptures are in the collections of the Chrysler Museum of Art, the Corning Museum of Glass, the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, the Northwest African American Museum, and Tacoma Art Museum. Her work has been collected by important collectors from around the United States including Eve and Chap Alvord, Leslie and Michael Bernstein, Corinne Dixon, Anne Gould Hauberg, Norma and Leonard Klofine, David Kaplan and Glenn Ostergaard, Joan Stonecifer, Barbara and Richard Wortley, among many others.
She is currently working on a major commission of the U. S. State Department’s Art in Embassy Program.
2020
ROSS PALMER BEECHER grew up in Riverside, CT. Her Puerto Rican grandfather, a Yale educated attorney, married her Ziegfeld dancer grandmother. Her parents worked in advertising and communications, but loved cocktail parties and sailing.
Beecher made art and objects at an early age and later studied art at RISD, before dropping out, after which she was on her own financially. In 1970 Ross began making and learning about quilts, inspired by some images from a quilt show her sister saw at the Whitney Museum in NYC. She came to Seattle in 1978 and began to make political cartoons as hand-colored Xerox prints at Pike Place Market before she made found object art. She joined the Greg Kucera Gallery in 1986, where she has had more than ten one-person exhibitions and been exhibited in many thematic exhibitions.
In 1980, Community Psychiatric Clinic offered her a part-time job running their art program. She began making woodcut prints and metal quilts as art, connecting to her New England roots through some of her chosen imagery and her love of folk art idioms.
When the AIDS epidemic broke out, Bailey-Boushay House hired her to run its art therapy program. She’s now 63, single, and still enjoying doing patient care there through the art program. Working with patients to make art informs her own art making.
Surveys of Beecher’s work have been exhibited at the Hallie Ford Museum in Salem, OR; the Whatcom Museum, Bellingham, WA; the Seattle Art Museum, and the Portland Art Museum.
2019
SHERRY MARKOVITZ (born 1947, Chicago, Illinois) received her BA from the University of Wisconsin in 1969, and moved to Seattle to attend the University of Washington, where she earned her MFA in 1975. Markovitz’s early collaged paintings were on unstretched canvas or board, occasionally embellished with beads and ribbons. In the 1980s, that decorative impulse led to a series of fully beaded animal heads suggesting feminine trophy heads. In the 1990s, Markovitz developed wholly abstract works constructed from organic papier machê forms, still beaded, but much more restrained. By 2000, Markovitz began a series of doll images in beaded sculptures and also watercolor works on paper. The 2000s brought forth a number of other beaded sculptures based on stuffed animals followed by paintings of dolls and then, by 2012, dogs painted on unstretched cotton. In the last few years, Markovitz has created linear forms using pliable, looping branches, covered in beading.
2018
MARITA DINGUS was born and raised in the greater Seattle area. She attended parochial schools where the nuns encouraged her talents, using mimeographed copies of her drawings as images for her classmates to color in 5th grade. During high school, her brother-in-law questioned why she never drew Black people, awakening her self-consciousness.
Marita attended Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and studied abroad in Rome. After earning her BFA, she enrolled in a study abroad program in Morocco. This first-hand exposure to African art, changed her focus from painting to sculpture at San Jose State, where she earned her MFA. She later completed Seattle Art Museum’s African Art training program.
Whenever she can, Marita visits the Caribbean, Africa, and South America to harvest inspiration and ideas that can be incorporated into her art. She continues to maintain her childhood home in Auburn where she raises goats, chickens, and two cats.
2017
ANN LEDA SHAPIRO (Vashon Island) grew up in New York City, next door to the Museum of Natural History and across the park from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
She spent the Sixties at art school in San Francisco, protested the Vietnam War, participated in consciousness raising groups and embraced feminism.
As an academic vagabond (token woman university art instructor) Ann has lived on a desert ranch in Arizona, a miner’s cabin in the Colorado Mountains, and on a ship that sailed around the world for the semester-at-sea program.
She has exhibited her paintings and drawings at the Whitney Museum in New York, the Berkeley Museum in California, the Puget Sound Credit Union on Vashon Island and at the Seattle Art Museum as part of the permanent collection.
Ann volunteered at an AIDS clinic in Texas where she was introduced to Chinese medicine. Inspired to research and illustrate Chinese medical history, she enrolled in acupuncture school, completed the drawings and became a certified acupuncturist.
Ann has traveled extensively from Europe to Viet Nam to Vashon Island where she has maintained an art studio in the shadow of Mount Rainier for the past twenty-five years.
2016
BARBARA EARL THOMAS is a visual artist and a writer. She has exhibited her work for more than 30 years in exhibitions at the Seattle Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, and Meadows Museum of Art, and her work is in corporate collections including Microsoft and Safeco. She is the recipient of numerous awards, such as a Mayor’s Arts Award and the Howard S. Wright Award from the Seattle Arts Commission, and residencies at Pilchuck, Tacoma Museum of Glass, and Hedgebrook. Her recent public art commissions include a laser-cut steel screen for Sound Transit and The Story House, a roofless, site-specific structure at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. Thomas studied under renowned painter Jacob Lawrence. She works in many mediums and materials, including painting, glass, paper, metal, wood, and egg tempera. In addition to her work as a visual artist, Barbara is an author, administrator, fundraiser, advisor, and former Executive Director of the Northwest African American Museum. In 2012, she left her post at NAAM to focus on her art. She is currently at work on new pieces for a solo exhibition at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art opening in June.
2015
DEBORAH FAYE LAWRENCE creates satirical collages that have been exhibited in one-person shows in New York, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, and Seattle, et al. She has earned grants from The Creative Capital Foundation, Pollock Krasner Foundation, Puffin Foundation, and Adolph and Shirley Gottlieb Foundation, among others. She teaches on the MFA faculty at Seattle University, and also teaches collage to community groups and public school students. Deborah is the artist who, at Laura Bush’s inadvertent invitation, created a controversial “impeachment” ornament for the 2008 White House Christmas tree. Deborah’s book, Dee Dee Does Utopia (Marquand Books, 2008) is available from Distributed Art Books, and in bookstores.
Deborah received 2014 GAP Award funding to present two affordable five-hour feminist collage workshops called “Eighty Words.” One workshop will be held at Highland Park Improvement Club in West Seattle; another in the Casey Building at Seattle University. The workshop will be open to the public, for adult participants regardless of gender. The workshops will use her list of 80 gender-specific words meaning “bad woman” to inspire fervent discussion among students – female, male, LGBTQ — about language bias.
Deborah received 2007 GAP Award funding for shipping and travel expenses to support an exhibition of the collage series Dee Dee Does Utopia. The work will be shown at the Frieda & Roy Furman Gallery, a non-profit space at Lincoln Center in New York, from June 29-July 31, 2007. The series resulted from a mass email the artist distributed on November 9, 2004 posing the question, “What does Utopia look like to you?” Lawrence received approximately 17,500 words in response, many of them from Seattle residents. “The artworks in the series are visual and verbal renditions of respondents’ descriptions of the sublime, which I’ve integrated with historic and literary texts about utopia.”
Deborah also received GAP Awards in 1995 and 1999, and a 2002 Fellowship from Artist Trust.
2014
CLAUDIA FITCH was born in Palo Alto, CA, and grew up in Seattle, WA. She received her BFA in Painting from the University of Washington in Seattle and an MFA in Painting from Tyler School of Art, Temple University in Philadelphia, and Rome, Italy. Claudia has exhibited at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City, the Seattle Art Museum and the Portland Art Museum. Honors includes an NEA Fellowship Grant in Sculpture, Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant, and the international Art + Architecture Fellowship at the European Ceramics Works Center. Public art commissions include Quest Field in Seattle.
2013
NORIE SATO is an artist whose artwork for public places over the past 25 years has incorporated individual, collaborative, design team and planning of public art projects. Much of her work involves collaboration with architects and integration with the site or context. She works from site and context-driven ideas first, then finds the appropriate form and materials. She strives to add meaning and human touch to the built environment and to consider edges, transitions, culture and connections to the environment. Norie‘s current and past work encompasses transit/transportation facilities, airports, libraries, universities, infrastructure, parks, and other civic structures. She works in sculpture, glass, terrazzo floors, integrated design work, landscape, video and light. In her studio work, she includes large works on paper and printmaking to the list of media. She has been active in the Seattle art scene since the 70s, when she was involved with and/or, an artist-run space, and as a commissioner on the Seattle Arts Commission in the nascent days of Seattle’s public art program. In addition, her own work in video, glass and on paper has been exhibited at galleries and museums around the country.
Her public art work has been recognized five times by the Public Art Network’s Year in Review. Recently, she produced a 300 ft. long glass façade for the San Francisco International Airport, artwork for University of Iowa and Iowa State University, and the new Port of Portland Headquarters. She has made work for the Arabian Library and McDowell Mountain Ranch Aquatic Center, both in Scottsdale AZ, and Miami International Airport. She was lead artist for Sound Transit’s Seattle Central Link Light Rail and has worked on transit systems in Portland, Salt Lake City and Tempe, Arizona. She was a member of the Seattle Design Commission which reviews city capital projects within the city of Seattle and is a former council member of the Public Art Network, a national organization focused on public art.
2012
PAT DE CARO has lived in the Northwest since 1980. Originally from Philadelphia, she attended the Fleischer Art Memorial School as a child; she received early recognition in the Gimbels City wide Young Artists Exhibit by the time she was sixteen. Among the awards Pat De Caro has received are the John Hauberg Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship to Italy, a Ford Foundation Grant, and residencies at Mac Dowell Colony. Her work has been exhibited in many solo and group shows here on the West Coast as well as in Europe, and is included in the collections of the Northwest Museum of Art, Seattle Arts Commission, and the Pilchuck School of Glass.
2011
BARBARA NOAH (Seattle) is a mixed-media artist with experience in painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking, public art, installations and digital imaging. Her work includes public art at the Canal Substation and Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. She is featured in the book The Painter Speaks: Artists Discuss Their Experiences and Careers, published by the Research Center for Arts and Culture, Columbia University. Her work has been published in ARTnews, and both her work and her writing have been featured in Art in America.
Barbara has exhibited in various art venues, both nationally and internationally, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, California; The Woman’s Building and the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in Los Angeles; the Center On Contemporary Art, Davidson Galleries, G. Gibson Gallery, the Seattle Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, and the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle; the Chicago International New Art Forms Exposition; Artists’ Space, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (now affiliated with the Museum of Modern Art) and The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City; the City Museum in Nakhodka, Russia; the Shenzhen Art Institute Gallery in Shenzhen, China; and the Biennial Exhibition of La Jeune Gravure Contemporaine-Paris in France. She is also represented in public and private collections, including the Seattle Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, the Grunewald Print Collection, Microsoft Corporation, Bank of America, the Swedish Foundation, and the Centrum Foundation.
Barbara’s work was chosen to be in the King County Public Art Collection for their portable arts collection. Barbara is also the recipient of the Pollock/Krasner Grant, a Betty Bowen Merit Award from the Seattle Art Museum, two Faculty Excellence Awards from Cornish College of the Arts, two Artist Trust GAP grants (1996 and 2004), and the Aurelia Henry Reinhardt Faculty Purse from Mills College. She received her B.A in Art from Mills College and an MFA from Pratt Institute in New York. She is currently represented by Davidson Galleries in Seattle, WA.
2009
ANN HIRONDELLE was born in Vancouver, Washington. Both geographically and conceptually, Anne’s work has changed, as she has changed from feminist turned ceramist to vessel based to sculpture based. While Anne has maintained her career from the corner of Jefferson County in serene and scenic Port Townsend, it has been one full of shifts and national recognition. As nominator Francine Seders puts it, “she is determined to push her work in new directions rather than stay within the comfortable parameters.” Anne’s ability to do so has brought her consistent attention from the press. Her work has been featured in the May 2009 publication of Ceramics Monthly and the 2008 October/November edition of American Craft. More than 30 years into her career, notice such as this is admirable.
Anne’s promise was recognized in 1988 with a Visual Arts Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and as a Betty Bowen finalist in 2004. Her work, made locally and exhibited globally, is found regularly in Seattle at the Francine Seders Gallery but has also been exhibited at the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center, the Kitteredge Gallery in Tacoma, and the renowned ceramic galleries of Garth Clark. Her work has been to SOFA and traveled in a White House Collection of American Crafts. The Museum of Arts and Design, SAFECO, Stanford University and the White House are a few who house Anne’s work in their public collections.
The 2009 panel for the Irving and Yvonne Twining Humber Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement saw in Anne a quiet and steady voice, a long interesting career, and an astounding, remarkable woman whom, in their eyes, honors the legacy and memory of Yvonne Twining Humber herself.
2008
MARY LEE HU is a masterful and passionate weaver of metal. As an artist, lecturer, and teacher, she has been an active contributor to the civic and cultural life of Washington State for nearly four decades. Mary realized in high school that metalsmithing was what she wanted to do for the rest of her life and she continues to be an innovator in her field.
Mary has received numerous awards including the Flintridge Foundation Award for Visual Artists and three NEA Crafts Fellowships. Her work is in the following collections: Renwick Gallery, National Museum of American Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Tacoma Art Museum; Yale University Art Gallery; American Craft Museum; the Victoria and Albert Museum, among others. Selected exhibitions include: “Jewelry by Artists: The Daphne Farago Collection,” Museum of Fine Art, Boston; Korean & American Metalsmithing Exhibition, Kepco Plaza Gallery, Seoul, Korea; “Craft in America: Expanding Traditions,” National Tour; “The Art of Gold,” Crocker Art Museum, and US Tour; “Sculptural Concerns: Contemporary American Metalworking”, Fort Wayne Museum and National Tour.
Mary was nominated for the Twining Humber Award by 2002 THA recipient Patti Warashina, who stated, “Mary’s artistic talents have broadened and enriched the aesthetics of the field of contemporary studio jewelry. Her research in gold work has brought her much notoriety worldwide. She is in a class of her own. Her experimentation with woven gold wire into fabulous neck pieces, cuffs and rings are a sight to behold. She is an artist who is focused and committed to her work and has stretched the boundaries in the field. Dedication in this laborious and technically difficult work is boundless, and she has shared her wisdom and research with the hundreds of students she has touched.”
2007
ELIZABETH SANDVIG is a distinguished artist and longtime contributor over many decades to the civic and cultural life of Washington State. She was honored at a reception on September 2007 at the Frye Art Museum. Friends, family, colleagues, fans, and well-wishers celebrated the life and work of one of our most beloved Northwest artists. Elizabeth was featured on Seattle Channel’s ArtZone.
2006
A Whidbey Island resident and Northwest artist since 1981, MARY HENRY originally hails from California. Her impressive career now spans eight decades and extends back to her first exposure to modernism at California School of Arts and Crafts in the 1930s and subsequent studies with Hungarian constructivist artist László Moholy-Nagy at the Institute of Design, Chicago, where Henry received her Master of Arts degree.
Mary Henry has been exploring and pushing the boundaries of formal geometric abstraction since very early in her career. Her vibrant palette and pristine order are signature to a remarkable body of work which has grown in scale and renown. Northwest Matriarchs of Modernism, a 2004 group show at the Art Gym at Marylhurst University, featured Henry’s paintings and traveled to the Museum of Northwest Art in LaConner, WA. Her most recent solo exhibit, Mary Henry: American Constructivist, at the Hallie Ford Museum at Willamette University in 2005, was reviewed in Art in America as revealing “a senior ‘matriarch’ of undiminished power and long-established formal mastery.”
In the past, Mary Henry has also shown her work in galleries—including a show at PDX Contemporary in Portland in 2003—and now keeps a studio adjacent to her Whidbey Island home. Among other awards and recognitions, Mary Henry received a Flintridge Award for Visual Artists in 2001. Her paintings are included in the collections of Seattle Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, the Institute of Design, Chicago, and such corporate art collections as Microsoft, Safeco, and the Hewlett Packard Company. Mary Henry will be honored with a private reception at the Frye Art Museum, May 11th.
Update from the Artist: Mary’s work was chosen to be in the King County Public Art Collection for their portable arts collection.
2005
During the 30 years she has been exhibiting on the West Coast, FAY JONES has become one of the region’s most esteemed artists. Working exclusively on paper with acrylics, watercolor and sumi ink, Jones often incorporates collaged materials in her paintings to achieve an unusually rich and singular surface. Her trademark style and otherworldly cast of recurring characters have become an integral part of our aesthetic landscape. Among the awards Fay Jones has received are two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a residency at La Napoule Art Foundation.
Jones’ work has been featured in over 100 solo and group exhibitions, and is included in the collections of the Seattle Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, and the Boise Museum of Art among others. In 1997, the Boise Museum of Art held a 20-year retrospective on Jones’ work (with an accompanying exhibition catalogue), and, in 2000, a catalogue of her work Fay Jones was distributed by University of Washington Press.
2004
DORIS CHASE’s highly innovative career spans 55 years of practice and has employed many media, including sculpture, painting, printmaking, video, film and computer generated prints.
Her work is represented in numerous permanent collections, including Museum of Modern Art, N.Y.C. (complete collection of film and video), Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art, Kobe, Japan, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C., British Film Institute, London, Lincoln Center Performing Arts Library, N.Y.C., Donnell Library Center, N.Y.C., Seattle Art Museum, Frye Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum and the Henry Art Gallery. Last year, friends and supporters created an endowment in her name at the University of Washington’s School of Art. The first Doris Chase scholarship will be awarded later this year.
2003
RAMONA SOLBERG was recognized internationally as an innovator and icon of contemporary craft. She helped pioneer the use of found objects and assemblage, as well as the use of ethnic elements and ornaments in twentieth century contemporary jewelry. Ramona was also widely renowned as an educator and mentor, teaching at both Central Washington State College (now Central Washington University) and the University of Washington, influencing many of the most recognized jewelers and metalsmiths from the Northwest.
2002
PATTI WARASHINA was born in 1940 in Spokane, WA. She earned her BFA and MFA from UW in Seattle (1962,1964); and taught 30 years. Her awards include: 2012 Watershed Legends Award, 2012 UW Timeless Award, 2009 Regis Masters; 2008 Voulkos Fellow; 1994 American Craft “Council of Fellows”; and a “Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2003” from UW, Seattle. Her personal “lifetime” papers and “oral history” have been collected by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute. She has commissioned awards from King County and Seattle Arts Commission, and received a “Commendation from the Governor of Washington State.”
Patti received a 2013 GAP to present an exhibition at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University in April 2014. The title of the exhibition is Observations of Time and Space. Based on this theme, she has conceived using three large walls to hang individual works, which make use of planetary or lunar shapes. Utilizing iconic cross-cultural planetary imagery, she intends to create a visual dialogue to bring about a much needed understanding between our countries.
Artist’s Addenda: Patti was named 2008 PONCHO Artist of the Year, plus won the 2008 PONCHO Artistic Merit Award. She also received the 2002 Irving and Yvonne Twining Humber Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement.
2001
Renowned Northwest photographer, MARY RANDLETT of Thurston County is the first recipient of the Artist Trust Lifetime Achievement Award for Women Visual Artists. Randlett’s photographic subjects include the natural environment of the Pacific Northwest, its architecture, and a unique documentary of the region’s creative people – poets, artists, sculptors, writers and architects – photographed in their studios and working environments.
ABOUT THE TWINING HUMBER AWARD
The Twining Humber Award is an unrestricted award of $10,000 given annually to a Washington State female-identified visual artist, age 60 or over, who has dedicated 25 years or more to creating art. The award is made possible by a generous gift from the painter Yvonne Twining Humber (1907-2004), who established the Irving and Yvonne Twining Humber Fund for Artistic Excellence to support the grant through Artist Trust in recognition of female-identified artists who oftentimes must interrupt or postpone art-making in order to answer the demands of family life. The award recognizes artistic excellence, professional accomplishment, and longstanding dedication to the visual arts.
You can read more about Yvonne Twining Humber and her legacy here. You can find some of her artwork at the Frye Museum here.
