Artist Trust Announces 2021 Twining Humber and SOLA Award Recipients

---

 

 

Artist Trust awards the 2021 Yvonne Twining Humber Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement to Debora Moore of King County and three SOLA Awards to Eva Isaksen of King County, Lisa Snow Lady of King County, and Mary Van Cline of Mason County.  

Celebrating its 20th anniversary, 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 Yvonne Twining Humber.

“As a woman artist who lived through most of the 20th century and into the 21st Yvonne Twining Humber experienced many daunting challenges while embodying the creative spirit until her death at age 96. She would be thrilled to see the benefit that this award through Artist Trust continues to have on celebrating the accomplishments of fellow women artists and encouraging their creative work after age 60”, said Claudia Bach, who represents the Yvonne and Irving Twining Humber Fund for Artistic Excellence.

“This honor helps me continue to explore the possibilities of glass sculpture,” said 2021 Twinning Humber recipient Debora Moore, “I am also grateful and humbled to have this important acknowledgment from my peers and community.”

For the third year Artist Trust also offered the SOLA Awards, three $3,000 unrestricted grants. Founded in 2016 by Ginny Ruffner, SOLA, which stands for Support Old Lady Artists, was created to honor and reward women artists over the age of 60 for their energy, vision, persistence, and dedication to maintaining creative momentum over the long haul.

 

Debora Moore (2021 Twinning Humber Recipient) was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Moore started working in glass in the late 1980s at Pratt Fine Arts Center. Moore served as an instructor at Pratt, the Hilltop Glass Program in Tacoma, and the Pilchuck Glass School. In 2005, Moore was an 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 the 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. 

 

“I am very honored to receive the SOLA Award. It means the world to me to be recognized for my work and for a lifetime of dedication to it. I am grateful and humbled by the recognition, it is both inspirational and meaningful for me and for the development of my future work. Thank you!” – Eva Isaken

Eva Isaksen (2021 SOLA Recipient) works in a variety of media, most frequently collage, acrylic inks, graphite, and monotypes. Recent explorations have pushed the collage style she is most known for into a more graphic, abstracted realm, using a range of soft neutrals and warm blacks, as well as controlled hits of highly saturated colors. She has also recently used source materials from her native Norway, vintage clippings from publications and texts. Everything Isaksen does is woven with her recognizable sensibility, while she continues to explore new realities within her work.  

 Eva Isaksen holds an MFA in painting from Montana State University, Bozeman, MT, as well as a BFA from the University of South Dakota, Vermillion, SD Isaksen’s artwork has been exhibited internationally, including at Galleri G. Guddal, Rosendal, Norway, Galleri Bodøgaard, Bodø, Norway, Kunstforeningen, Bodø, Norway, US Embassy Brussels Belgium and Museo de Los Pintores Oaxaquenos, Oaxaca Mexico. Isaksen has also exhibited her work extensively across North America and has been a recipient of dozens of awards and public art commissions. She has participated in many Artist Residencies, most recently at Tare AIR, Steigen, Norway, Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Ballycastle, Ireland, and Messen AIR, Ålvik, Norway.  

 Her work is part of dozens of private and corporate collections including those of Boeing Corporate Headquarters, Chicago, IL, Ballinglen Museum of Contemporary Art, Ballycastle, Ireland, Nordland Regional Hospital, Bodø, Norway, 4 Culture King County Portable Art Collection, Seattle, Museum of Northwest Art, La Connor, WA, and the United States Embassy in Riga, Latvia. 

 

“I feel very honored to receive this award and take my place alongside the other SOLA recipients – amazing women who have dedicated their lives to their art. It encourages me to remain committed to my lifelong journey as an artist! Thank you so much!”  – Lisa Snow Lady

Lisa Snow Lady (2021 SOLA Recipient) was born in Seattle and earned her BA in Fine Art and Art History and her BFA in Painting from the University of Washington. A love of gardens led her to pursue a degree in Ornamental Horticulture from Edmonds College. While working as a Graphic Designer she cultivated strong compositional skills which continue to inform her paintings and mixed media works.  

Inspired by her Pacific Northwest surroundings, she portrays the beauty found in everyday places and uses her colorful palette to elevate the ordinary with themes of the neighboring landscape, lush gardens, and quiet interior spaces.  

Lisa has had numerous regional and national exhibits and has won many awards and distinctions for her paintings and mixed media pieces. Her work is in the collections of The University of Washington Medical Center, Swedish Medical Center in Ballard (23 painting purchase), Evergreen Hospital in Kirkland, and Overlake Hospital in Redmond. She is currently represented by Harris Harvey Gallery in downtown Seattle, and Imogen Gallery in Astoria, Oregon.  

Lisa’s love of travel has taken her throughout Western Europe, along the Aegean Coast of Turkey, and into San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, to fill up the pages of her watercolor journals. In 2019 she was delighted to teach a week-long Watercolor Workshop in Trevi, Italy. 

 

“As a woman who began in the 1970’s when glassblowing was mostly men, I am proud to be considered part of the history of the contemporary studio glass movement. Women commit to their art, making decisions along their creative journey in different ways than men. The SOLA award is a distinctive acknowledgment honoring women who have maintained a steadfast dedication to their creativity. It is a great honor to be included with the recipients.”  – Mary Van Cline

Mary Van Cline (2021 SOLA Recipient) combines photographic imagery and cast glass. Experimenting with Kodak emulsions, 1977, set her course inventing photosensitive glass processes for the next forty years.  

Receiving a Japan/US Friendship NEA Fellowship Award, 1986, financed capturing film images of the archipelago islands of Japan. USIA Arts America, 1993, commissioned a large installation for Cincinnati Arts Museum, which then traveled to 14 venues in Southeast Asia. Her large transparent glass photograph reflects narrative imagery of time passing and healing into a giant reflecting glass pool, marking a timeless drama of theatre in the round.  

Adapting industrial techniques is important to her creative process, whether it’s aerospace industries etching photo imagery into large bronze slabs, or computer lighting systems projecting moving images. Being invited to Dupont Industries, 2007, providing access to experimental processes embedding her photo imagery within their safety glass for a private commission in Tel Aviv. In 2012, expanding realistic castings, she moved to a bronze foundry, learning mold-making techniques for life-sized figures of sugar glass, a process she created using time-heat compression in kilns.  

A pioneer in contemporary studio glass, her journey was recently recorded for the Oral History Program at the National Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Photography has a memory-evoking power, the very process stops time altogether. Her imagery invites the viewer to look for changes in ourselves, crossing the lines of our imagination. To be for a while in a space where time does not just standstill, it does not exist at all. 

 Artist Trust received 48 applications for the 2021 Twining Humber & SOLA Awards. The applications were reviewed, and the awardees were selected by an independent peer-review panel consisting of visual artists Lisa Telford of Snohomish County, Susan Bennerstrom of Whatcom County, and Naoko Morisawa of Snohomish county.  

 “Congratulations to all. Here’s to more creativity, more art, more recognition, more of all good things. I was going to say keep on keeping on -but it’s obvious that you have, and you will “, said Founder of SOLA, artist Ginny Ruffner 

2021 Twining Humber & SOLA Awards Recipients 
Debora Moore, Visual, King County
Eva Isaksen, Visual, King County
Lisa Snow Lady, Visual, King County
Mary Van Cline, Visual, Mason County

2021 Twining Humber & SOLA Awards Panelists 
Lisa Telford, visual artist, Snohomish County
Susan Bennerstrom, visual artist, Whatcom County
Naoko Morisawa, visual artist, Snohomish county

 

---