Aspen Art Museum awards four inaugural artist fellowships

The Aspen Art Museum has awarded its inaugural Aspen Art Museum Fellowship awards to prominent artists based in Carbondale, Paonia and Snowmass Village.

The 2019 awardees are Carbondale’s Wewer Keohane, Snowmass Village’s Michael Lorsung, Paonia’s Shannon Richardson and Carbondale’s Andrew Roberts-Gray.

With four awards given annually, the fellowship will provide recognition, support and mentoring for artists working in any medium living within a 100-mile radius of the museum. Fellows will be given the unique opportunity to expand their studio practice through the use of the museum.

Each year, four selected artists will work closely with curatorial and educational staff, visiting museum professionals and exhibiting artists over a nine-month fellowship period. Artist fellows will meet once a month during the course of the program for opportunities ranging from contact with visiting artists and curators to presentations from museum staff and studio visits with fellows.

The annual program will culminate with each artist creating a project that reflects their collaborative experiences with the museum and the other fellows during their tenure. Each will receive a $1,000 honorarium to help realize their project.

Participants will share their fellowship project with the public in a free talk and presentation format at the conclusion of the program.

“The purpose of the Aspen Art Museum Artist Fellowship is threefold: to foster the creative process of our selected fellowship artists in conjunction with resources available within the museum; to provide a unique connection between the museum, and the artists through the realization of a proposed project and to further strengthen ties and foster dialogue between the AAM and our local artist community as a whole,” Aspen Art Museum director Heidi Zuckerman said in the announcement. “The AAM is very pleased to offer this opportunity, and we welcome this, our first group of fellows, for what promises to be an exciting and energizing nine months for us all.”