It’s that time of year again, when The San Francisco Foundation puts a call out to Bay Area art students to apply to Murphy & Cadogan Contemporary Art Awards. Every year the Foundation invites emerging artists from a select pool of art schools to compete for this prestigious award, selecting 10 to 20 students, which includes a scholarship of $4,000.

So what are these awards really about? Why do we bother giving them away? Unlike many other awards in the entertainment and arts industry that are based on large-scale achievements, this award is unique because it celebrates new artists. We don’t accept resumes and we don’t expect applicants to give us long lists of galleries they have shown in or other accolades they have received. We only ask to see a recent body of work and a brief statement. A panel of jurors selects winning artists based solely on their work samples. This is an exceptional opportunity for students that have just arrived to the art world and are eager to get out there.

Our jurors have historically had quite an eye for rising stars. Many past awardees have gone on to build successful careers as professional artists. Our website features an impressive list of past winners.

I was able to catch up with Toyin Odutola, a recipient of one of the 2011 awards. She credits the scholarship with giving her confidence in what she was creating. “Up until that point, I was still a little unsure about how people were interpreting my work. Yes, it’s an award, but there was some validation in it. In short, I felt more and more like a legitimate artist.” After being recognized by our panel, others have also noticed Odutola’s work, featuring her drawings in galleries around the US. She was also named in the Top 30 under 30: Arts & Style by Forbes Magazine and made the list of notable 30 Black Artists Under 40 by Huffington Post.

In addition to the scholarship, the second component to the award is participation in a group exhibition at the SOMArts Cultural Center, where students from all over the Bay Area come together to display their work. Since the award is given to artists working in digital art, film/video, hybrid practice, installation, mixed media, painting, photography, and sculpture, this show is an invaluable opportunity for students to build community across disciplines. Odutola shared that this aspect of the award truly sets it apart. “In graduate school, everyone sort of has their blinders on. It was a pleasure to interact with other artists… it felt less isolated, more collective. It just felt really great to be amongst peers and I felt proud to be a part of it all. I really did.”

The deadline for submissions is May 6, so check out Arts & Culture page for guidelines and how to apply.

The prestigious award, established by the late photographer John Gutmann (1905-1998), brings with it $10,000 to support the development of Umbrico’s creative work.

“Sunset Portraits from 8,480,717 Sunset Pictures on Flickr on 12/29/10,” 2010, machine c-prints,
detail of 2500, 4in x 6in

Administered by The San Francisco Foundation, photographers are nominated by a distinguished group of professionals in the field. The award is then adjudicated by a separate group of eminent photographers and photography curators.

Umbrico has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally, and her work is in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.

Her photo-based installations, video, and digital media works explore the ever-increasing production and consumption of images on the Internet. She is the recipient of numerous awards including most recently a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, and a Deutsche Bank-NYFA Fellowship.

“Broken Sets (eBay),” 2011, installation Recontres d’Arles, Discovery Award Nominee Exhibition, c-prints on metallic Kodak paper, each 20in x 30in

Umbrico’s first monograph, “Penelope Umbrico (photographs)“, was published by Aperture in 2011.

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The cash itself will likely be used within a few weeks, but there are other dividends that the award pays out over time because the awards encourage them so tremendously. When talking to young artists, I tell them that artists often find themselves at the same crossroads again and again.  At these crossroads, they must repeatedly decide if they can continue to pursue their artistic dreams, or if it has become unsustainable to lavish time, money, and energy on their artist practice. As a fellow artist, I tell them that asking how full or empty they are feeling on the five variables below may help them clarify where they need to go next.  The variables are as follows:

Resources: Do you have the money, people, information, connections, materials, space, venues, and context you need to do your best work and keep developing?

Reciprocation: Are you feeding your artistic practice what it needs to be strong?

Sustainability: Do you feel like you can keep managing your artistic practice the way you have been managing it?

Joy: Does doing your work continue to make you feel satisfied and happy?

Courage: Does your artistic life fortify you enough esthetically, politically, spiritually, and intellectually to push through your fears and make your work happen despite the obstacles?

When I think about the various awards and grants The San Francisco Foundation gives out to artists in the visual, performing, literary, and media arts, it is very poignant how even a small award can satisfy so many of the above needs.  A very sweet thank you card sent to us by awardee Carolyn Ho sums it up beautifully:

Dear Jaime and Tere,

“I won the Phelan Award!  Thank you so much for such wonderful news.  I’m elated to have been considered and selected.  My earnest gratitude for all of your hard work to make this possible.  It gives me courage…”

Amen, Carolyn, amen.

2009 James Duval Phelan Award – Edan Lepucki of Los Angeles, CA

2009 Mary Tanenbaum Award for Nonfiction – Page McBee of Oakland, CA

(SAN FRANCISCO) – October 21, 2009 – The distinguished Joseph Henry Jackson, James Duval Phelan, and Mary Tanenbaum Nonfiction Literary Awards, sponsored by The San Francisco Foundation and administered by Intersection for the Arts since 1991, are offered annually to encourage young writers (20 to 35 years old), who are either California-born or currently residing in Northern California or Nevada, for an unpublished manuscript-in-progress. 2009 marks the 52nd annual Jackson Award, the 72nd annual Phelan Award, and the 19th annual Tanenbaum Award. In addition to a $2,000 cash award for each of the three awards, the award-winning manuscripts will be permanently housed at U.C. Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. Each of the 2009 award winners will read from their award-winning manuscripts. These awards have proven to be instrumental in the careers of young writers, many of whom have gone on to securing either literary agents or publishing contracts as a result of these awards. Over 180 manuscripts of fiction (novels and short stories), poetry, nonfictional prose, graphic novel, and drama were submitted to the awards. This year’s competition was judged by Persis M. Karim, Toni Mirosevich, and giovanni singleton.

About the winners

Youmna Chlala is a writer and visual artist. She received her MFA at the California College of the Arts where she was also the Founding Editor of Eleven Eleven {1111} Journal of Literature and Art. Nominated for a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, she has published in the MIT Journal for Middle Eastern Studies, XCP: Journal of Cross Cultural Poetics. She is the recipient of residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Hedgebrook and Can Serrat, among others. She also received a Walker Fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She has read her fiction for Neighborhood Public Radio’s project in the 2008 Whitney Biannual, and is working on a novel about architecture in Beirut and Los Angeles. She is currently visiting faculty at LaGuardia Community College and Pratt Institute in New York. The official award citation for Youmna Chlala’s 2009 Joseph Henry Jackson Award winning poetry manuscript “The Paper Camera” states:

In The Paper Camera “wings crocheted from orange blossoms” and “windows stained pink with rosewater” serve as richly storied lenses. Whether digital or disposable, Youmna Chlala gives us an expansive view of struggle, of emotion, and of all that is as fragile and as impermanent as paper. These poems are unnerving in that they seem unaware of their identity as poems. The words, their images, come in close, befriend you but not without a shadow presence, not without the negative from which they have been developed. Often the poems’ ambiguous endings arrive unmarked, unpunctuated. And beyond this appears to be an unescorted haunting wrapped in paper silence. Geography and history become stones thrown into water, rippling outward into the ordinariness, the simple grace of the everyday. And for this we “walk across olive groves to get to the almond, to crack it in our teeth suck its juice.” Many tongues, crumpled or neatly folded, seek to articulate the inherent complications of nature, of wholeness, of belonging, and even of breakfast. We are reminded that war in the world makes language and its translations a battleground. Ultimately, The Paper Camera brilliantly exposes the unraveling of existence and offers a glimpse of our own necessary rise from ash. – 2009 Panel of Judges: Persis M. Karim, Toni Mirosevich & giovanni singleton

Edan Lepucki was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. She is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her fiction has been published in Narrative Magazine, Meridian, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine, among others. She is a regular contributor to the popular books and culture website The Millions and she has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Ucross Foundation, and the Squaw Valley Writers’ Conference. She has recently finished a novel. The official award citation for Edan Lepucki’s 2009 James Duval Phelan Award winning fiction manuscript “Days of Insignificance and Evil” states:

“But wait. I want to tell you another story, one that happened a few years before this. It must be related.” So says Rosalyn, the fourteen year old narrator in Edan Lepucki’s Days of Insignificance and Evil. In this remarkable and revelatory new novel we find Rosalyn carried along by events beyond her control—parents who abandon her to an older sister’s care, a new home life full of fracture, secret liaisons, and mysterious clues to a violent historical event; the all-female 1904 Los Angeles Iron Foundry Rebellion. As readers we’re carried along by a narrative voice in total control. Lepucki gives us a character that comes across as true and familiar as someone we know very well. Someone willing to share their secrets with us. Like the narrator we are quickly on the hunt to find out more about that past event.  Members of the rebellion surprise us by interrupting Rosalyn’s narrative and bringing their flesh and blood voices to the mix. Via that weave of past and present Lepucki makes disparate worlds and time periods cohere in ways the reader never anticipates. Here’s a writer who has the extraordinary ability to make both worlds—and all worlds—true simultaneously. And as we turn each page we know there’s always another story waiting, another twist and turn, a dog leg into the past, a time bomb in the present. Go ahead, we want to say. Tell us another one. Serendipity or coincidence, chance or fate. It must all be related. – 2009 Panel of Judges: Persis M. Karim, Toni Mirosevich, & giovanni singleton

Page McBee is in her fourth year as a writer-in-residence at the San Francisco School of the Arts (SOTA). She has co-curated and co-organized the multidisciplinary San Francisco arts event series “Go” as well as the Pittsburgh arm of the reading series, “K’vetsh.” Page has been published most recently in Big Bell and the anthology, Baby, Remember My Name, and is currently a guest blogger exploring representations of the body for Bitch magazine. Page was selected to attend RADAR Production’s writers’ retreat, Radar LAB, in 2009. Page has worked in education at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Academic Talent Development Program at U.C. Berkeley, and at the Academy of Arts and Sciences in San Francisco. In 2008, Page served as the Literary Arts Curator for SFUSD’s district-wide Young at Art event. Page’s writing can be found in multiple print and online publications, as well as on her website, www.pagemcbee.com. Page holds an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State, and a BFA in creative writing from Emerson College. The official award citation for Page McBee’s 2009 Mary Tanenbaum Literary Award winning nonfiction manuscript, “This Fragile Fortress” states:

When a piece of writing troubles us, stirs us, ignites our curiosity, and leaves us wanting more, we know deep-down that this writer has something to say. Such is the case with Page McBee’s “The Fragile Fortress,” an ambitious hybrid collection of interpersonal essays that explore the body and the meaning of embodiment. McBee’s challenge is to find a language that gets at both the comfort of bodies and the estrangement that they also evoke. Her essays, informed by scientific philosophy, mythology and the concept of liminality, are undergirded by a deeply personal exploration into her own journey through the transgender experience. Her work in this collection is to erect an archive that is woven from her own stories and the stories we tell ourselves as humans. Just as readily, however, McBee aims to undermine that same archive with a recognition of how truly fragile we are–even when we build a fortress of stories around ourselves. Her work is rich with possibilities and inventive in its attempts to move beyond merely an exotic narrative of “self” but instead in grappling with bigger ideas which she identifies as “trauma, healing, expression, memory, and history.” – 2008 Panel of Judges: Persis M. Karim, Toni Mirosevich, & giovanni singleton

About the namesakes of these awards

Joseph Henry Jackson moved to California after WWI and became editor of Sunset Magazine from 1926-28. From 1924-1943 he hosted the radio program “Bookman’s Guide,” and in 1930 he became literary editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, continuing in that role for the rest of his life and gaining national prominence. He was also the author or editor of some dozen books, often concerning California history. He served on many literary boards, including the O. Henry Memorial Award, the Harper Prize Novel, and the Pulitzer Prize. In his book columns and by personal contact, Jackson was always interested in discovering and encouraging new writers. Appropriately, his friends established the Jackson Award at The San Francisco Foundation after his death in 1955.

James Duval Phelan was born, raised, and educated in San Francisco before entering the family banking business. In 1897 he ran for mayor of San Francisco, was elected and re-elected twice, gaining a great reputation for drafting a new city charter and beautifying the city through new parks and playgrounds. Later elected to the U.S. Senate, he served as a Democrat from 1915 to 1921. During his lifetime he encouraged and financially aided writers, artists and musicians, for whom he provided very generously through his will after his death in 1930.

Mary Tanenbaum began her career as a journalist after her graduation from Stanford in 1936. Her first job was book reviewing with Joseph Henry Jackson for the San Francisco Chronicle; her articles on books, travel, fashion, and personalities have appeared in the Chronicle, The New York Times, the New York Herald-Tribune, and The Christian Science Monitor. The Tanenbaum Award was made permanent in 2000 by her husband Charles in memory of Mrs. Tanenbaum’s legacy as an author.

About the judges

Persis M. Karim has been an associate professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at San Jose State University since 1999. She received both her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and her M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. She has been a visiting scholar at the California College of the Arts, and has taught at UC Santa Cruz and University of Texas at Austin. She is the editor of Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora (University of Arkansas Press, 2006) and co-editor of A World Between: Poetry, Short Stories, and Essays by Iranian-Americans (George Braziller, Inc. Publishers, 1999). She has published articles in the Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Literature (Greenwood Press, 2005), Women Without Men (The Feminist Press, 2004), Twenty-First Century American Novelists (Thomson/Gale, 2004), and her poetry in Alimentum, Reed Magazine, Caesura: The Journal of the Poetry Center San Jose, Heartlodge, and Asian American Literature. Karim has also participated in conferences at the University of Maryland, Santa Clara University, UCLA, University of Pennsylvania, Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association, University of Utah, and UC Santa Cruz. She is currently working on a collection of essays, In the Belly of the Great Satan: Art, Literature and the Emergence of Iranian American Identity. This is Karim’s third and final year serving as a judge for the Jackson Phelan Tanenbaum Literary Awards.

Toni Mirosevich grew up in Everett, Washington, in a Croatian-American fishing family, part of an extensive immigrant Slav community. Her first jobs—as a truck driver, attic insulator and weatherizer, swimming pool operator, blood bank mobile unit operator, janitor, and handyperson—were, in the 70s, viewed as nontraditional work fields for women. In her early thirties, she received her M.A. and M.F.A. in creative writing at San Francisco State University, where she began teaching as a lecturer in creative writing in 1991. Firebrand Books published her first book of poetry and prose, The Rooms We Make Our Own, in 1996. That same year, Mirosevich became associate director of the Poetry Center and the American Poetry Archives. Her book of poetry, Queer Street (Custom Words) was published in 2005. Another poetry collection, My Oblique Strategies, won the 2005 Frank O’Hara Chapbook Award and was published by Thorngate Road. She has been the recipient of the Astraea Foundation Emerging Lesbian Writer in Fiction Award, Pushcart Prize, and Lambda Literary Award nominations, and has received fellowship support from the MacDowell Colony, the Willard R. Espy Foundation, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. Mirosevich writes and teaches in multiple genres. Her award-winning work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Gastronomica, Puerto del Sol, UTNE, San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, and various other publications. Poems and nonfiction stories have been anthologized in Best American Travel Writing, The Impossible Will Take A Little While, The Discovery of Poetry, Best of the Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. Toni Mirosevich is a professor in creative writing at San Francisco State University, and lives in Pacifica, California. This is Mirosevich’s second year serving as a judge for the Jackson Phelan Tanenbaum Literary Awards.

giovanni singleton received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from New College of California and her B.A. in Communications/Print Journalism from The American University. She has been a visiting writer at California State University of Los Angeles, writer in residence at School of the Arts in San Francisco, instructor at St. Mary’s College, and a teacher with WritersCorps in San Francisco. She is the founding editor of nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, and has published her own work in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Five Fingers Review, Callaloo, Fence, Chain, Proliferation, and MIRAGE #4/PERIOD(ICAL). She has served on the board of directors at The Poetry Center and Archives at San Francisco State University and Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center. She was a fellow at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Poetry Workshop, a visiting writer at Cave Canem: A Workshop for African-American Poets, a fellow at The Virginia Commonwealth University’s Zora Neal Hurston/Richard Wright Poetry Workshop, and was a recipient of a New Langton Arts Bay Area Award for Literature. This is singleton’s third and final year serving as a judge for the Jackson Phelan Tanenbaum Literary Awards.