Tanne Foundation Announces 2015 Artist Award Recipients

The Tanne Foundation is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2015 awards.

Now in its seventeenth year, the foundation's mission is to underscore the importance of supporting individual artists with unrestricted funding.

The awards, totaling $52,500, honor eight artists in recognition of their artistic achievements as well as one artist-run organization which has presented exceptional work for over 38 years.

The 2015 recipients are:

Cynthia Babak, Brooklyn, New York, is a multi-disciplinary theater artist. Babak infuses all her work with a fine ear for comedy, which she considers an excellent tool for communicating complex ideas and feelings, as well as a good coping mechanism. Her full-length play Where I Dwell was first presented in workshop at the Lanyard Theatre in Bath, Maine, and was recently presented as part of Florida Repertory Theatre's PlayLab. It is slated for a fall 2016 Off-Off-Broadway production. Babak is a founding member of the Brave New Theatre in Brooklyn.

Peter Handy, Bloomfield, New Jersey, is a playwright dedicated to crafting stories that reveal how transcendent love can awaken the human spirit. Handy's works explore a recurring theme: the schism between the core values of human beings and the lifestyles that they feel culturally impelled to lead. His published plays include:East of the Sun & West of the Moon and Friendship. Handy was a founder of First Light Productions in Portland, Oregon and a playwright with the Foothill Theatre Company in Nevada City, California.

Taylor Pilote, Tampa, Florida, is a sculptor whose work combines the skills used in custom car modification with the sensibility of a surrealist. A self-proclaimed "shop rat", Pilote grew up around his father's auto paint and body business, learning an immaculate craft which he later adapted to his own creative concerns. Taking cues from the visual language of America's car culture, he crafts widely inventive high art sculptures that are at once familiar and strange.

John Romang, Paducah, Kentucky, is a visual artist working in watercolor, mixed media, painting and drawing. Each work that he creates consists of three layers of plexiglass. Romang fuses ink and resin on these panels that appear to examine the rivers and lakes that surround him. His translucent panels vary in size and can take the form of light boxes that deliver additional intensity. Romang is working on completing a new studio space that will allow him to teach his process and invest more deeply in his creative explorations.

Jesse Ray Sims, Cave City, Kentucky, is a visual artist. Sims works predominantly as a painter and educator in his studio in Horse Cave, Kentucky. His work reflects his experience as an architectural draftsman and in manufacturing. He passionately documents rural landscapes in south central Kentucky with a focus on the ever-changing and distinctive topography of the karst region of Kentucky. His goal is to show the vital connections between science, math and art while developing new ways to explore, discover and record the landscape around him.

Kate Snodgrass, Somerville, Massachusetts, is a playwright. Snodgrass began her theatrical life as an actor, but in mid-career, interested in creating roles for women, she turned to playwriting and found her vocation in supporting new plays in all their stages of development. Fascinated with subtext and the elusiveness and power of language as a path to both personal and communal discovery, Snodgrass believes that drama must ask questions without prescribing answers. With theater as a mirror of society in all its vagaries, artists and audiences may discover the answers together. She is Associate Director of the Boston Playwrights Theatre.

Jordan Weber, Des Moines, Iowa, is an artist and activist. Weber's mixed media work explores the issues of consumer culture as they relate to the identities of young African-American men. Often constructed from re-purposed materials such as old basketball goals, athletic shoes and plywood used to board up condemned houses, his work challenges the notion of materialism as a remedy for poverty and despair. Weber is a recipient of an Artist's Fellowship from the Iowa Arts Council and was recently featured in the Manifest Justice exhibition in Los Angeles. His current work examines the recent incidences of inner-city police violence.

Mark Whitley, Smiths Grove Kentucky, is a sculptor and woodworker. Drawing lines between visual forms and cultural references, Whitley re-contextualizes and opens up new meanings using a combination of materials to create original designs in wood, metal and leather. Starting with a place, an image, a specific memory, or an object, he creates structures and narratives using personal symbolism and different modes of representation. Whitley is a recipient of the Kentucky Arts Council's Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship and his work is featured in private and public collections.

Mobius, Inc. Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a nonprofit artist-run organization that has presented an exceptional range of visual, performance and multi-media arts for 38 years. Its mission is to generate and test experimental art. The Mobius Artist Group has produced hundreds of original works of great diversity along with national and international collaborators and guest artists. Mobius artists have produced work throughout the United States, Canada, South America, Europe and Asia. Mobius is a previous recipient of the Tanne Award.

About the Tanne Foundation - Founded by an artist, the Tanne Foundation is dedicated to enriching the artistic experience and broadening 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 eighty-eight artists and nine organizations in recognition of their 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.