When painter Rebecca Kautz learned she had won the 2024 Forward Art Prize, her first reaction was relief.
“The prize has been around for six years, and I’m pretty sure I’ve applied every single year,” said Kautz, a painter with a studio in Sun Prairie. She had been a finalist for the unrestricted $10,000 prize — given each year to two women artists in Dane County — in 2022 and 2023.
“I thought, ‘I just don’t know if I can keep doing it,’” Kautz said. “I was excited and relieved, and thrilled that the work had been recognized. It’s the biggest award I’ve ever received for my work.”
Madison-area artists Bird Ross and Brenda Baker started the Wisconsin Forward Fund in 2017 to support local women artists and highlight persistent inequity in the art world.
Despite progress, gender parity is a ways off. A 2024 Artnet Intelligence Report, released in May, noted that out of the 100 top-selling artists at auction in 2023, only 11 were women. According to a story in the New York Times, only 15% of exhibitions between 2008 and 2020 featured the work of all women, or mostly women. Artsy found that in 2023, “25% of inquiries on for-sale artworks were for works by women artists.”
The first Forward Art Prizes of $10,000 each were awarded to Dakota Mace and Jennifer Angus in 2019. Organizers say 65 artists applied this cycle, down from 82 in 2023.
Rebecca Kautz, one of two winners of the 2024 Forward Art Prize, makes work in her studio in Sun Prairie.
RUTHIE HAUGE
This year’s winners, Kautz and Ann Orlowski, were honored at a reception Saturday night at the Willy Street Co-op’s community space Aubergine, where work from Forward Art Prize entrants will be on display through Dec. 2.
Before the awards were announced, the 2023 winners, Mary Bero and Babette Wainwright, shared with a tightly packed crowd how the funds had changed their own work the previous year.
“Artists like me who work in isolation incubate their creation like a pregnancy,” said Babette Wainwright, a Haitian-born sculptor. She used her prize money to get two pieces cast in bronze, frame a few drawings and update her website. “We carry it very privately within ourselves until we are ready to bring it to the light.
“My intimate approach to art appeases my own demons and suits my soul,” she said. “I don’t seek approval, but when my work gets noticed, as it did with such a prize, it’s a ray of sunshine. It elevates my work to the light so others can see it and appreciate it.
“It feels like a standing ovation, but one that’s accompanied by a big check.”
Visions of space
Both of this year’s winners work with paint and depict domestic spaces, though their art looks nothing alike.
Orlowski, the gallery director at Abel Contemporary Gallery in Stoughton, makes what look like 3-D images using hard-edged geometric shapes and understated colors. For “Moon Room,” an exhibition at Abel earlier this year, she paired paintings with a sculpture and an ambient soundscape created by her husband, Nick Orlowski.
Ann Orlowski, one of two winners of the 2024 Forward Art Prize for women artists in Dane County, is pictured in her home studio in Madison.
RUTHIE HAUGE
At Saturday’s event, Ross cited juror feedback about Orlowski’s work.
“Her references to homes are abstractive and receptive, emphasizing the interior of home spaces in a collection of forms that float together in space, like a complicated, subtle origami form,” Ross said.
She cited the “seductive blush, understated tones of blues, greens and sepia tones” in Orlowski’s paintings, which Orlowski creates with matte, opaque casein paint.
She moved to Madison in 2002 to pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree. Though she didn’t complete that degree, she started to develop a regular painting practice. In 2006 she joined Abel, then based in Paoli, as a sales associate. She’s been the gallery director since 2019, when the gallery moved to Stoughton.
This painting, "Dry Moon," is from Ann Orlowski's "Moon Room" exhibition. Orlowski works with matte, opaque paint called casein paint.
ANN ORLOWSKI
“I’ve dovetailed curation and my personal art practice into my art career,” Orlowski said. “It’s this great mix of helping artists … selling their work and showing their work, but also doing my own practice. I think both of those things strengthen each other.”
The Forward Art Prize, she said, will buy her time.
“I’m the mother of an 8-year-old,” she said. “I was thinking, ‘What do I need in my studio, more than anything?’ Time. Which is the one thing you can’t buy.
Ann Orlowski makes what look like 3-D images using hard-edged geometric shapes and understated colors.
RUTHIE HAUGE
“But I’ll probably use some of it to send my kid to summer camp … having her somewhere where she is enjoying herself and growing in a way that I feel good about will give me the time and headspace to be in my studio.”
Orlowski might use some of the funds for larger canvases, materials that will allow her to scale up. She’s hoping to get to Asheville, North Carolina, where she has a show in 2025, if the Hurricane Helene-battered area is ready for tourism.
“There is something very freeing about having an unrestricted pile of money,” she said. “I have to come down to earth a little bit.”
Rich imagery
Kautz’s art also has a domestic focus but is more figurative, using symbolism like a Vermont Castings wood-burning stove, rotting fruit, pottery alligators and dead game birds.
“Rebecca’s lush paintings and drawings of interior home settings explore themes of identity, belonging and place,” Baker said, citing juror feedback at Saturday’s event. “Using candy colors that hearken to the ’80s and ’90s pop culture and modern art movements, her work is filled with intermingled nods to 17th-century Dutch still life painting, surrealism and folk art.”
Kautz’s painting now up at Aubergine, “Promises of Winter” includes several of these elements rendered in acrylic on canvas. (Kautz also works with oils and hard wax crayons.)
“The wood stove is an image icon from my childhood home in rural Illinois,” Kautz said, “It was during the energy crisis of the ’70s, and a lot of people were buying these Vermont Castings wood stoves. … It was a fixture in our living room. I was one of three girls, and the stove became basically a member of our family.”
But as jurors noted, Kautz’s work has an edge to it. Some of the objects evoke “terror, disharmony or a feeling of quiet dislocation or unease,” Baker said. One juror, Simona Chazen, found Kautz’s paintings “full of tension.”
Jurors said Rebecca Kautz's lush paintings and drawings "explore themes of identity, belonging and place" and are full of tension.
RUTHIE HAUGE
Kautz studied at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago and said the Impressionists and Dutch masters had a profound impact on her. She completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2018 and teaches life drawing there now as a lecturer.
Kautz doesn’t have firm plans yet for the prize money. At the top of her list right now are supplies — materials for painting and framing costs. She’s weighing how she might invest some of the money back, purchasing work from other artists that inspires her, or even organizing an event or exhibition in Sun Prairie, which “really needs more arts and culture and opportunities for artists.”
“There are fantastic artists that we are just not aware of, making fantastic work,” Kautz said. “It’s recognition. This is pushing the work forward and strengthening the art community.”
Like a magic wand
In addition to the two main winners, five artists received $1,000 from Dane Arts: Sarah Getenhart Stankey, Angela Johnson, Heather Kohlmeier, Karolina Romanowski and Sarah Stellino.
Johnson, a photographer and educator who teaches in the UW-Madison Art Department, and Stellino, whose photographs are featured in theFlakPhoto Flat File at Arts + Literature Laboratory through Nov. 9, have both been finalists before.
This year’s jurors were Rachel Davis, Yeonhee Cheong (a winner in 2021), Chazen, Martha Glowacki and Yvette Pino. The Forward Art Fund endowment now has about $600,000 in it.
For artists like Wainwright, the prize is worth more than cash.
“It felt, when I got this check, like a magic wand,” said Wainwright, the 2023 winner. “Something that I could do like this” — she gestured in the air — “and make my dreams come true. When such a gift as the Forward Art Prize comes our way, it is the spirit of our ancestors telling us, ‘We trust you. We trust you to share. That’s why we give it to you.’”
Lindsay Christians is an editor for the Cap Times. Lindsay oversees the newsroom’s coverage of food, arts and culture in the Madison region. Email story ideas and tips to Lindsay at lchristians@captimes.com.
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