Wednesday, September 30, 2020

UW-Madison Ag Hall Exhibit and Rountree Gallery Award




Wow! My piece, Gabrielle has received a quite a bit of recognition this year.

WRAP Show Awards
Gabrielle earned a State Award in the Madison Regional WRAP Show held last spring. The show was originally hung in the Pyle Center on the UW campus, but when the coronavirus hit the campus closed so the show moved online, as did most of the remaining 2020 regional WRAP as well as the WRAP State Show. View the State Exhibit here.

At the State Show, Gabrielle was given the Rountree Gallery Award sponsored by Friends of Our Gallery (FOG), a support organization for the Rountree Gallery in Platteville. As a long time member of FOG and a huge admirer of the Rountree Gallery, I was really pleased that my piece won this particular award. Many thanks to FOG for this award! 


Ag Hall Exhibit
Each year the UW-Madison College of Agriculture and Life Sciences selects a number of pieces from the annual WRAP State Show to hang in their AG Hall for the coming year. This year, due to COVID, the Ag Hall exhibit is going virtual. I am very flattered that my piece, Gabrielle, is among 14 pieces selected for their 2020 online exhibit. 

Click here to view the exhibit.

The UW Ag Department has a connection to the WRAP program going back to its inception. Here's the history of WRAP's connection to the AG program from the AWA website (AWA, formerly WRAA, is a volunteer support group for the WRAP program): 

"The association was founded mainly as a support group for the Rural Art Program (RAP), begun in 1940 by UW-Madison’s Dean Chris Christensen and Prof. John Barton. These visionary men believed the lives of rural families could and should be enriched with art. They recruited John Steuart Curry to UW to be an artist-in-residence who would spend time traveling about, encouraging citizen artists and crafts people. By 1945 the RAP had held its first exhibit in Madison of works by non-professional artists from around the state. The program became so popular that Prof. James Schwalbach was hired to coach rural artists and set up exhibits. He and Curry’s successor, Aaron Bohrod, attended a dozen shows per year, teaching and judging. The plan for a regional artists’ association was first proposed by a handful of artists who were excited by the early RAP and wanted to help UW Extension reach out to even more Wisconsin artists, stating this goal explicitly in their by-laws."

Thank you to the Ag Department for this honor!


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