October 15, 2007

Gutmann Photography Fellowship Winner Announced

(SAN FRANCISCO) – Monday, October 15, 2007 – The San Francisco Foundation announced today that Allison Sexton, of Brooklyn, New York, is the winner of the seventh John Gutmann Photography Fellowship. The Fellowship selects an emerging artist in the field of creative photography who exhibits professional accomplishment, serious artistic commitment, and financial need. Along with the prestige and recognition of receiving the award, this year’s fellowship includes a $10,000 prize.

Allison Sexton’s photographs are about a stagnant place between life and death, combining portraits, still lifes, and landscapes, not in order to describe what is there, but what no longer is. Her aim is to evoke sentiments of irony and melancholy in order to emphasize what she feels is the ultimate paradox of the human condition, a static territory between growth and decay. She earned her Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts from the California College of the Arts and her Master’s Degree in Fine Arts from Yale University, where she received the Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship. Allison lives and works in New York City.

The world-renowned artist, John Gutmann, who passed away in 1998, established the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship Trust at The San Francisco Foundation. Gutmann began his career in Berlin during the early 1930s and emigrated to San Francisco when the Nazis banned his exhibitions and forbade him to teach. For more than 60 years thereafter, he was a recognized presence in the cultural life of San Francisco as a painter, educator, collector, and, most prominently, as an international photographer. He had exhibited in numerous institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts (Lausanne, Switzerland). He also taught at San Francisco State University over a 37 year period until his retirement in 1973. He founded the department of photography in 1946, one of the first on a college campus.