2020 Margaret Stonewall Wooldridge Hamlet Award Recipients announced
Vanderbilt Department of Art’s Margaret Stonewall Wooldridge Hamblet Award recipient for 2020: Rebecca Arp
Vanderbilt University Department of Art is pleased to announce the recipient of the prestigious Margaret Stonewall Wooldridge Hamblet award for 2020. This year’s recipient is Rebecca Arp, of Columbus, OH. As a Hamblet winner, she will receive a $25,000 prize that provides the funds for a year of art research and travel, culminating with a solo show at Vanderbilt in one year. The $10,000 Merit Award was presented to Sydney Kaemmerlen, St. Louis, MO. In a unique year, and within unique circumstances, the class of 2020 Vanderbilt Art seniors have shown their resilience and dedication to continue making art. Adjusting and adapting to their home studios, they have all produced beautiful and intriguing thesis works, showing to the world true perseverance and creativity.
Rebecca Arp is an interdisciplinary artist concerned with emotion, memory, ritual, and religion seen through the lens of her queer experience. She saturates quotidian objects and practices with meaning, using emotionally and historically charged materials and processes to speak about her family, relationships, and identity. Arp is distinctly interested in where art meets life and the exchange between one’s self and one’s proximate environment. Arp’s changing working conditions due to the Covid-19 pandemic have influenced her practice, and she acknowledges these limits through various changes to her exhibition. She adapts what she originally envisioned as a poetry reading performance that would have taken place in the gallery into a video format that can be experienced digitally. She chose to memorialize the few tools she has access to—a hammer, chisel, screwdriver, and palette knife—and celebrate their enduring ability to create artworks by casting them in the wax from Advent candles. An Advent wreath is composed of four candles, three purple and one pink, each representing a distinct virtue of hope, faith, joy, or love. These wax tools symbolize art-making, world-making, and future-making; and they give Arp the ability to create a future that reclaims these virtues.
Sydney Kaemmerlen is constantly striving to discover more about herself and her surroundings. Her work, driven by this pursuit, explores identity and questions normalcy on both an individual and societal scale. As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, her work often deals with her observations as a queer woman in the contemporary world. Her project, queer notion, is a project based in reflection and communication. The piece features photographs of the artist wearing six crochet masks, each made using the fabric from recycled clothing as yarn. She chose this material intentionally, utilizing clothing as commonly understood physical reflection of our identity. She deconstructs each item of clothing into a liminal form before carefully crocheting it into a novel object. Each mask is made to represent an emotional sensation that she has experienced in her identity journey. frustration, passion, hope, dread, self- reliance, and hesitancy serve as the names for each of these sensations. In wearing a mask, which is meant to communicate her inner experience, Sydney Kaemmerlen juxtaposes the definition of the object as something meant to conceal with the intent to outwardly express one’s inner self.
Please access the 2020 Senior Show, Worlding by visiting this link:
https://worlding.myportfolio.com/
Jurors selected to serve for the competition are all distinguished artists and educators. Jurors this year included Edra Soto, School of the Art Institute Chicago, independent artist and photographer Stacy Kranitz, 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, and Ethan Morrow, Chair in Painting and Drawing at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts / Tuffts University.
The Department of Art has supervised the awarding of the Margaret Stonewall Wooldridge Hamblet Award since 1984. The award was established by Clement H. Hamblet in honor of his wife, whom he met while she was studying abroad. The Hamblet Award is meant to provide the means for travel and independent art activity for one year, culminating in an exhibition at Vanderbilt.