Mowry Baden, Upper and Lower Case, 2009.
Canadian artists Mowry Baden and Mark Ruwedel have won 2014 Guggenheim Fellowships.
The list of fellows was released this morning by the Guggenheim Foundation.
Overall, 178 scholars, artists and scientists received the fellowships this year. They were chosen from a pool of nearly 3,000 applicants.
According to his website, Baden was born in Los Angeles in 1936 and educated at Pomona College and Stanford University. He has lived and worked in Canada since 1971. He has practiced sculpture for nearly 50 years and has taught sculpture at UBC and the University of Victoria, from which he retired in 1997.
Baden is known for works that play with viewer perception and experience. Most recently, he collaborated with Victoria artist Sandra Meigs on a series of helmets that had panoramic imagery attached.
Through his teaching on the West Coast, Baden has influenced a number of Canadian artists, including Jessica Stockholder and 2011 Sobey Art Award co-winner Christian Giroux.
As Ann Ireland reported in a Winter 2010 feature article on Baden in Canadian Art, “He views his legacy as bringing an American—and specifically Californian—sensibility to Victoria by promoting artists such as Michael Asher, Bruce Nauman and Lewis Baltz, and as ‘encouraging generations of students to look outside the walls of the art world.'”
Born in 1954 in Pennsylvania, photographer Mark Ruwedel earned his MFA at Concordia University in 1983. Some of his most recent series of work, Desert Houses, Dusk and Crossings—which document structures found in wasteland-like environments—were featured at the National Gallery of Canada’s Canadian Biennial in 2012. These series, the biennial catalogue noted, add “to the ongoing and epic visual narrative that the artist has been developing over the past three decades about the deserts of the Southwest United States and incursions into them.”
Ruwedel’s work is in the collection of Tate Modern, the Getty Museum, and the Stedelijk Museum, among other institutions. His books Westward the Course of Empire and One Thousand Two Hundred Twelve Palms (1212 Palms) were published by Yale University Art Gallery.
In a release, Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation, called the winners “the best of the best.”
This is the 90th year of the Guggenheim Fellowship awards. Last year the Canadian winners included Kim Adams and Scott Conarroe.
