Announcing the 2022 Twining Humber and SOLA Award Recipients
Published: October 18, 2022
Categories: Artists | Featured | Grants & Fellowships | Uncategorized
Announcing the 2022 Twining Humber and SOLA Award Recipients!
We are thrilled to award the 2022 Twining Humber Award to Tip Toland of Pierce County and four SOLA Awards to Janice Arnold of Thurston County, Joan Stuart Ross of King County, Polly Sutton of King County, and Gail Tremblay of Thurston County. Congratulations to all of these amazing artists!
The Twining Humber Award is an unrestricted award of $10,000 given annually to a Washington State self-identified woman 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 to the Artist Trust Endowment Fund by the Irving and Yvonne Twining Humber Fund for Artistic Excellence.
Founded in 2016 by Seattle artist Ginny Ruffner, the SOLA (Support Old Lady Artists) Awards, seeks to honor, encourage, and celebrate the lifetime contributions of women whose artwork has not been sufficiently or widely recognized. In its fourth year, in collaboration with Ginny and friends’ generous contributions, we are excited to offer four unrestricted grants of $5,000, an increase from three grants of $3,000 in years past. This increase includes an award that honors a Black, Indigenous, and person of color (BIPOC) artist, part of an overall strategy to reverse historic inequities in Artist Trust’s funding programs and move resources to Washington State communities without access to other funding for individual artists.
We received 89 applications for the 2022 Twining Humber & SOLA Awards. The applications were reviewed, and the awardees were selected by an independent peer-review panel. Thank you to our panelists, artists Tricia Harding of Walla Walla County, Tillie Jones of Snohomish County, and Mary Van Cline of Mason County!
About the Recipients:
Tip Toland, Twining Humber Award Recipient
Tip Toland lives in Vaughn, Washington. She received her MFA from Montana State University in 1981. Tip is a full-time studio artist and a part-time instructor in Seattle. She conducts workshops across the United States, Europe, Australia, Mexico, Taiwan, and the Middle East. She is represented by Traver Gallery in Seattle, WA.
Her work is in public and private collections, including: The Yellowstone Art Museum, The Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian, Nelson Atkins Museum, The Crocker Museum, St. Petersburg Museum of Art, The Daum Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Arizona State University Ceramics Research Center, The Eleanor Wilson Museum at Hollins University, Kohler Arts Center, Portland Art Museum, Racine Art Museum, Yingee Ceramics Museum, Zanesville Museum of Art, Fuller Craft Museum, Icheon Museum of Ceramics.
Janice Arnold, SOLA Award Recipient
For over 40 years Janice Arnold has been creating textile art, immersive installations and community participatory events centered around her handmade textiles. The daughter of a cartographer, she credits her childhood experiences with mapmaking and science for inspiring her curiosity and fierce independence for seeking uncharted territory in her work.
Arnold’s artwork stems from her passion and respect for ethnographic textiles. She travels extensively to learn ancient textile traditions within cultural contexts. Working with indigenous peoples has given her a profound respect for their wisdom and spirit embodied in their art. She credits these origins for helping her learn to listen to the voice of fibers and allowing her to nudge the humble living fiber – wool – to audacious places, on a physically unprecedented scale. Her explorations and inventions of new approaches and techniques have redefined the medium of handmade Felt in art, theatrical, architectural, environmental and community-based arenas.
Arnold exhibits and lectures nationally and internationally about her textile art and ethnographic felt-making. Her work is the permanent collection of the Cooper-Hewitt Nat’l Design Museum, and public and private collections worldwide. She was the only American artist commissioned for the Smithsonian’s Fashioning Felt Exhibition where she created the installation, Palace Yurt, the acclaimed centerpiece. She has received numerous grants and awards and was nominated and received an American Craft Council Rare Craft Fellowship Finalist Grant. She is currently working on a project co-sponsored by the Smithsonian, Union of Artists Kazakhstan, Chevron, and the US Embassy for a series of in-person presentations, community events and installations in Kazakhstan.
Joan Stuart Ross, SOLA Award Recipient
Joan Stuart Ross was born in Boston and was introduced to the ‘handmade’ by her Swedish and Scottish relatives. The brilliant colors at Whitehorse Beach were big influences. Joan graduated from Connecticut College and studied at Yale with Josef Albers, an ongoing inspiration. She earned an MA and MFA in Painting and Printmaking at the University of Iowa, and in 1968, moved to Seattle. She taught, painted, printed, volunteered, and become immersed in Seattle’s arts community. Joan mentored hundreds of artists and continues to mentor others. She has co-managed and subsidized BallardWorks since 2004, offering below-market-rate studios to Seattle artists.
Joan won the Betty Bowen Award from SAM, the Kathe Kollwitz Award for advocacy of women artists, a Rome Fellowship from the Civita Institute, and a Fulbright-Hays Grant to Vietnam. Joan has been a resident at Centrum, Pilchuck, Balestrand, Espy, Playa, and Rancho Linda Vista. Her art is in SAM, TAM, MoNA, National Nordic, and many other collections. Joan served on the boards of Seattle Print Arts, Bumbershoot, Seattle Art Commission, Civita Institute, and the Ballard High Art Committee. She taught Art for 40 years, at Pratt, at the UW, in her own studio, and as a tenured professor at North Seattle College.
Color dynamics and a celebratory, questioning attitude are among Joan’s themes. Trial, error and risk are hypotheses that explore the unknown. She draws, paints, prints, develops collage and encaustic in her Seattle and Nahcotta, WA studios. The poplar tree, shell, text ,and knot suggest a symbolic undercurrent.
Polly Sutton, SOLA Award Recipient
Polly Sutton is a long-time resident of Seattle’s Beacon Hill neighborhood. She creates her basketry art from the fibers of native Washington species: cedar bark gathered in freshly-logged forests and sweet-grass respectively collected from Pacific Ocean tide-flats. She has become well-known for using the flexibility of the cedar and sweet-grass fibers to create asymmetrical art in the manner of free-form baskets.
Her work is widely exhibited. Twelve times, the prestigious international Sculpture Objects & Functional Art (SOFA) Fair has invited Polly to display her art at their annual Chicago and New York City festivals. In addition, 50 museums, galleries and associations across the U.S., including browngrotta arts (Wilton, CT) and Mobilia Gallery (Cambridge, MA) display her work. A photo of one of her free-form baskets graces the cover of the ‘coffee-table” book, 500 Baskets: A Celebration of the Basketmaker’s Art (Lark Books, 2006). The Boston (MA) Museum of Fine Arts and the Kamm Teapot Collection both have added her work to their collections. The National Basketry Organization, previously supported a traveling exhibit “Rooted, Revived, Reinvented: Basketry in America, along with a written history which included Polly’s work. A large installation of her work was acquired last year by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and is now on display in the Renwick Gallery’s 50th Anniversary exhibition “This Present Moment.” Polly earned a Master of Arts degree in art education from Michigan State University and a bachelor’s degree in art from Eureka College, Eureka IL. Polly received a 2012 GAP grant.
Gail Tremblay, SOLA Award Recipient
Gail Tremblay is descended from Onondaga and Micmac ancestors. She resides in Olympia, WA and has been an artist, writer, and cultural critic for over forty years. She shares her vision through her multi-media visual works, art installations, and her writing on Native American Art.
As a professor emerita at The Evergreen State College, she has mentored students in the fields of visual arts and Native American and cultural studies. She has served the artistic community as a member from 1989-2001 and in 1999-2000 as the president of the National Board of the Women’s Caucus for Art. She received a national “Mid-Career Art Award” from that organization in 1993. She has also received a Governor’s Art Award in the state of Washington for her Contemporary Art in 2001. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally in over 100 group and solo exhibits and has work in important museum collections.
About Artist Trust
Artist Trust is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization whose mission is to support and encourage individual artists working in all disciplines to enrich community life throughout Washington State. Since its founding in 1986, Artist Trust has invested more than $15 million in individual artists through its grants and professional-development programs. As a fundraising organization, Artist Trust relies on numerous individuals and community partners to make its support for artists possible each year. Learn more at artisttrust.org.
2022 Twining Humber & SOLA Awards Recipients
Tip Toland, Pierce County
Janice Arnold, Thurston County
Joan Stuart Ross, King County
Polly Sutton, King County
Gail Tremblay, Thurston County
2022 Twining Humber & SOLA Awards Panelists
Tricia Harding, Whatcom County
Tillie Jones, Snohomish County
Mary Van Cline, Mason County
2022AwardAwardsRecipientSOLASola AwardsTwining Humber Award
