The University of Wisconsin–Madison Arts Institute provides research support to faculty, staff and students in the arts. Each spring, the Arts Institute recognizes achievements and professional service along with supporting future creative endeavors and research. The recipients will be honored on May 9, 2017 in the Education Building.
The Institute offered nine awards this year, amounting to approximately $86,000. The awards are divided into three categories: Arts Faculty Research, Arts Faculty and Staff Outreach and Undergraduate and Graduate Student Achievement in the Arts. This year’s committee was Kate Corby (chair), Dance Department; Mary Hark, Design Studies Department; Mark Hetzler, Mead Witter School of Music; and Matt Mauk (graduate student representative), Art Department. Donors that support the awards include Emily Mead Baldwin, the Joyce J. and Gerald A. Bartell family, David and Edith Sinaiko Frank, Suzanne and Roberto Freund, Bassett and Evjue Foundations, Lyman S.V. Judson and Ellen Mackechnie Judson, Emily McKay and Ruth and Hartley Barker and Duane and Susan Tirschel.
Arts Faculty Research
Arts Institute Creative Arts Award:
T.L. Solien, Art Department
Emily Mead Baldwin Award in the Creative Arts:
Lisa Gralnick, Art Department
Beverly Taylor, Mead Witter School of Music
Arts Faculty & Staff Research
Joyce J. and Gerald A. Bartell Award in the Arts:
Ron Kuka, English Department’s Creative Writing Program
Edna Wiechers Arts in Wisconsin Award:
Aristotle Georgiades, Art Department
Undergraduate and Graduate Student Achievement in the Arts
David and Edith Sinaiko Frank Graduate Fellowship for a Woman in the Arts:
Allison Roberts, Art Department
Liz Kozik, Design Studies Department
Lyman S.V. Judson & Ellen Mackechnie Judson Student Award in the Creative Arts:
John Hallett (Graduate), Art Department
Lyndsay Lewis (Undergraduate), Dance Department
Biographies (Alphabetical by last name)
Professor Aris Georgiades (Wiechers) | arisgeorgiades.com
Aristotle “Aris” Georgiades holds an BFA degree from the University of Michigan and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a sculptor who creates individual studio works as well as a partner in the collaborative public art team Actual Size Artworks with Gail Simpson. Actual Size has done more than 25 large scale permanent public art projects nation-wide as well as many long term temporary projects. Individually Georgiades is represented by Carl Hammer Gallery in Chicago where he has had a solo exhibition and been included in several group shows as well as at international art fairs. Professor Georgiades has been teaching for more than 20 years and has been at UW–Madison since 2000. He was awarded the Educator of the Year Award by the International Sculpture Center in 2014 and subsequently had a multi-page article about his career published in Sculpture Magazine.
Professor Lisa Gralnick (Baldwin) | lisagralnick.com
Professor Gralnick joined the art faculty at UW–Madison in 2001 after 12 years as Chair of Metals/Jewelry at Parsons School of Design (NY). Awards include the Vilas Award, the Kellett Award, the Creative Arts Award, and a Faculty Development Grant. External awards include a Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant, a Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowship, four fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and two NEA Fellowships. In 2014, she received a Mondriaan Award to attend a three-month residency at the European Ceramic Work Center in the Netherlands. Recently, Gralnick was awarded the Master Metalsmith Award, which includes a solo retrospective exhibition with a catalog at the National Ornamental Metals Museum. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of Arts and Design (NY), Smithsonian Institution, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Chazen Museum of Art and Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam). She has an MFA from SUNY-New Paltz.
John Hallett (Judson graduate) | jhallett.com
Born and raised in Adelaide, Australia, Hallett has studied and worked in design, craft, fabrication and fine art since 2004. He holds a Bachelor of Industrial Design from the University of South Australia and has worked in a variety of creative and instructional roles throughout Australia, Europe and the United States. He is currently pursuing an MFA at the UW–Madison, graduating in May 2017.
Liz Kozik (Sinaiko) | liz.kozik.net
Liz Anna Kozik is a third-year MFA student in the Design Studies Program within the School of Human Ecology. Her work interprets Midwestern relationships with nature through the language of decorative surface design and narrative comics. Utilizing these engaging and accessible forms, she invites people into the ecology and history of the landscapes they live in. She received a BFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2011. She has worked as a product designer, learning firsthand the visual language employed to make desirable objects.
Lyndsay Lewis (Judson undergraduate)
Lyndsay Lewis is a fifth-year senior at UW–Madison pursuing a double major in dance and psychology. She has worked as a lead experimenter on the Games and Well-Being study which investigated the role of video games and their relationship to pro-social behavior, compassion and empathy. She joined Performing Ourselves, a Madison-based dance outreach program committed to bringing dance to girls in underserved areas, as both a dance teacher and research assistant. This past spring, Lewis piloted a movement program intended to promote neurological development in preschoolers at Kennedy Heights Community Center. She currently teaches elementary and middle school curriculum at Vera Court Neighborhood Center.
Her work with Performing Ourselves closely intersects with her performance and creative work in the Dance Department. She has had opportunities to co-produce concerts, assist guest artist Heidi Latsky, and perform with Chien Kuei Chang as well as faculty members Kate Corby, Collette Stewart and Jin-Wen Yu. She has also performed in numerous works featured in student concerts over the last four years. Two works she has been involved in, The Vocabulary is Inconsequential (2015) and Influx (2016), have been adjudicated at American College Dance Association’s 2015 and 2016 conferences. Lewis has received scholarships for summer study at both Strictly Seattle (2015) and at Bates Dance Festival (2016). She was also a recipient of the School of Education’s Helen Pfuderer Smith scholarship for the 2015-16 school year. Her most recent performances include the World Dance Alliance—Americas conference in Puebla, Mexico and the Detroit Dance City Festival.
Faculty Associate Ron Kuka (Bartell)
Ron Kuka received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, one of the most competitive and highly ranked graduate programs in the field of creative writing. His creative work was honored with a Wisconsin Arts Board Individual Artist grant. Kuka is a faculty associate in the English Department’s Creative Writing program and serves as faculty mentor to The Madison Review, the print journal edited exclusively by undergraduates. He is the recipient of the 2001 Brenda Pfaehler Award for Teaching and the 2000 Chancellor’s Hilldale Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Kuka serves on a number of English Department and university committees, and, most recently has become faculty mentor of the creative writing program’s online literary zine, Devil’s Lake, which is edited by creative writing’s graduate students. Since 2011 he has also been the lead teacher for the fiction and memoir classes offered in the Oakhill Correctional Institution in Oregon, WI.
Allison Roberts (Sinaiko Frank) | allisonaroberts.com
Allison Roberts is a third-year MFA graduate student in the Art Department, exploring loss, absence, and identity through the lens of the domestic. As this body of work developed, Roberts gravitated toward a new approach to her practice — lens based media, including photography and the projected image. She combines this with sculptural elements to create installations that invite the viewer to physically move through the space and encounter the projections from multiple points of view.
Roberts completed her MA at UW–Madison in May 2016. She also holds a MA in visual arts (emphasis in printmaking) from Minnesota State University-Mankato. Roberts is the recipient of multiple grants before coming to UW, including a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant in 2014, and two Jerome Fiber Artist Project grants through the Textile Center of Minnesota in 2014 and 2009. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally (UK, Egypt) in addition to extensive regional exhibitions in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Professor T.L. Solien (Creative Arts) | tlsolien.com
T.L Solien received a BA degree in Art from Moorhead State University, Moorhead (MN) in and an MFA in Painting and Sculpture from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Solien has held teaching positions at The Ohio State University, The University of Iowa, Montana State University and is currently a tenured professor in the Art Department at UW-Madison.
T.L. Solien has been the recipient of numerous honors, including multiple Bush Foundation and Jerome Foundation fellowships, University of Wisconsin Graduate School Research Grants, and has been named “Outstanding Alumni” at both the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Moorhead State University. In 2008, Solien was awarded a fellowship from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and in 2010 received a Wisconsin State Arts Board fellowship. Solien has been invited to participate in numerous exhibitions of national and international magnitude including, the 1983 Whitney Biennial, the 39th Biennial of American Painting at the Corcoran Museum, Washington, D.C.; Avant-Grade in the 80’s, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The American Artist as Printmaker, Brooklyn Museum; Images and Impressions, Walker Art Center; and Contemporary Drawings, High Museum of Art. His work is in many museum collections including, the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Walker Art Center, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Chazen Museum of Art and the Tate Modern, among others.
Professor Beverly Taylor (Baldwin) | conductorbeverlytaylor.com
Professor and Director of Choral Activities, Beverly Taylor is Assistant Conductor of the Madison Symphony Orchestra and Director of the Madison Symphony Chorus. Recognized by The Boston Globe as a conductor with “the crucial gift of inspiring people to give of their best, and beyond,” Taylor leads the UW–Madison choral conducting program and its premiere vocal ensembles. For seven years, she was Music Director of the Back Bay Chorale, performing with the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra and other professional ensembles. Her recording of Robert Kyr’s Passion According to Four Evangelists is available on the New Albion label. Past positions include Harvard University, Boston Bar Association Orchestra and guest engagements with international orchestras and choruses. With degrees from University of Delaware (BA, English and BM, voice) and Boston University (MM, music history), she received fellowships from Chorus America and Aspen, and is a 2016 semi-finalist for the American Prize in choral conducting.