The Tanne Foundation is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2010 awards.  Now in its twelfth year, the foundation’s mission is to underscore the importance of supporting individual artists with unrestricted funding.

This year’s awards, totaling $35,600, honor three artists in recognition of their artistic achievement as well as one artist-run organization which has presented exceptional work for over 30 years.

The 2010 recipients are:

Patrick Earl Hammie, Champaign, Illinois, is a painter. He has developed a body of figurative work based on the images of the male body as a metaphor for social and political concerns such as identity, gender and race. His paintings explore the tension between power and vulnerability and examine how male artists have historically represented themselves and the nude.

Hammie studied art at South Carolina’s Coker College and at the University of Connecticut. Hammie’s work has been shown in numerous exhibitions throughout the U.S. He recently joined the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Kanarinka Boston, Massachusetts, is an artist and educator. Her art practice is interdisciplinary and is often distributed across various sites, physical and virtual. A single project might take place online, in the street and in a gallery and involve multiple audiences participating in different ways for different reasons. Many of her projects are collaboratively authored.

Her artwork as been exhibited at the ICA Boston, Eyebeam in New York City, MASSMoCA, and the Western Front in Vancouver. Kanarinka, a.k.a.Catherine D’Ignzaio, is Co-Director of the experimental curatorial group, iKatun, and a founder of The Institute for Infinitely Small Things. She currently teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design in the Digital Media Graduate Program.

Steve Murray, Macon, Georgia, is a playwright. His plays including Hungry to Bed, Rescue & Recovery, Mileage, and This Passion Thing have been produced nationally. His work has been commissioned by Actor’s Express in Atlanta and the Portland Center Stage in Oregon.

He was an award-winning film, theater and book critic and reporter for Atlanta newspapers and continues to contribute to the arts blog, www.ArtsCriticATL.com. His plays touch on the elusive nature of truth, the potential of everyday people for great kindness and unthinking cruelty and the crazy things people sometimes do for love. However, his plays are written he says “always with humor, because that’s what keeps us human.”

 Mobius, Inc., Boston, Massachusetts, is recognized as one of the seminal alternate artist-run organizations in the United States. Mobius produces and presents performance art, video, sound art, dance, installation and multimedia works by the Mobius Artists Group, their collaborators and guest artists.

Negotiating the space between creative people, between creative people and the general public, between art and public-space, and among artistic media, have been the basis of its artistic investigations since it was found in 1977. The artists have presented their work through the United States and at venues and festivals in Canada, South America, Europe and Asia.

About the Foundation

The Tanne Foundation was founded by an artist in order to enrich the artistic experience and broaden horizons for artists and audiences alike. The foundation’s primary interest is in the support of individual artists. Led by a board comprised of a majority of artists, the foundation is guided by the philosophy that in the creation of art, however unrecognized or obscure the voice, the sound may be extraordinary and it is vital that it be heard.

Since its inception the foundation has made awards to fifty-eight artists and nine organizations in recognition of outstanding achievements in a variety of fields in the visual and performing arts, including performance art, painting, poetry, music, acting, and dance. Nominations for awards are made by the trustees of the Tanne Foundation.

The foundation does not accept unsolicited requests. For more information, contact Michelle Jenney at the Tanne Foundation, c/o GMA Foundations.