The Minneapolis College of Art and Design and the McKnight Foundation are proud to announce the recipients of the 2013/14 McKnight Artist Fellowships for Visual Artists: Catherine Meier of Duluth, and Joe Sinness, Amy Toscani, and Dyani White Hawk of the Twin Cities.

Designed to identify and support outstanding mid-career Minnesota artists, the McKnight Artist Fellowships for Visual Artists provide recipients with $25,000 stipends, public recognition, professional encouragement from national visiting critics, an artist book, and exhibition at the MCAD Gallery. The fellowships are funded by a generous grant from The McKnight Foundation and administered by MCAD.

The 2013/14 McKnight fellows were selected from a group of 190 applicants by a panel of arts professionals of varying backgrounds whose careers intersect with the visual arts in different ways. This year’s jurors were Megan Hamilton, an arts writer and program manager at the Creative Alliance, a community-based non-profit arts organization in Baltimore; Gilbert Vicario, senior curator at the Des Moines Art Center; and Lynne Yamamoto, a practicing artist and associate professor of studio art at Smith College in Northampton, MA.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Catherine Meier explores the meaning of “open space” in her large-scale graphite drawings, woodcuts, and animations. Representing a state of mind as well as a state of being, these expansive landscapes are redolent of the artist’s own travels crossing the Great Plains of North America and the Mongolian Steppe where her experience of freedom and boundlessness also fueled feelings of fear and paranoia. Meier has shown her work in gallery and museum settings in the Midwest, South, and Japan, at film festivals, and in the very landscapes that gave rise to her drawings. She has a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and an MFA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her awards include two from the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council.