John Grade

John Grade creates large-scale sculptures that are exhibited internationally in museums, galleries, and outdoors in nature. His projects are designed to change over time and often involve large groups of people to collaboratively build and install. He is the recipient of the 2010 Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (NY), a Tiffany Foundation Award (NY), an Andy Warhol Foundation Award (NY), two Pollock Krasner Foundation Grants (NY), and the 2011 Arlene Schnitzer Prize from the Portland Art Museum. His 65-foot sculpture Wawona is permanently installed at the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle where it breaks through the floor and ceiling of the building, bridging a view from the water below the building to the sky above.

John received 2010 GAP Award funding to cover the costs of documenting the gradual evolution of his piece Circuit, through video and time-lapse photography. Circuit will be a sculptural installation that will be sited on a mountaintop in the South Cascades in January 2011. Made of glazed ceramic plates bonded with a gypsum polymer to corn-based resin set in marine netting, the 10,000 lb. structure will be carried in 400 parts up the mountain simultaneously by 200 volunteers (in the snow). Designed to crack apart through exposure to extreme temperatures the sculpture will gradually change shape over the course of one year.

John received 2007 GAP Award funding for documentation of Fold (Seven Types of Catastrophe), a sculptural installation sited in Willow Canyon, South Utah at the Escalante National Monument. The work, cast in a composite of cellulose, glassine pulp, and ground white sesame seeds will be suspended across the open mouth of the canyon, and documented from above and below, as natural forces contribute to its collapse and deterioration. Photographic and video documentation of the collapsing project will be shown alongside the remaining bird-picked remnants of the project. The work is scheduled for exhibition at the Bellevue Art Museum in August 2008 and at Davidson Contemporary in Seattle in November 2008.

John received 2004 GAP Award funding to aid in completing a video narrative of his sculptural process and underscore how the labor-intensive pieces are constructed in stages not visible in the finished object. As such, his sculptures are an exploration of “temporary supporting structures, ad hoc tools made to reach and bend, and hanging devices.” This video will create a dialogue between the sculptural process and the finished art object.

He also received a 1999 GAP and a 2002 Fellowship from Artist Trust.