LOCAL ARTISTS WIN PRESTIGIOUS FELLOWSHIP

The Florida Keys Council of the Arts announces the selection of local artists Leo Gulick and Richard Haden as the 2007 winners of the South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship for Visual and Media Artists.

Gulick and Haden secure a prize of $7,500 each in the fellowship program, joining twelve other artists from South Florida so honored in this year!s SFCC competition.

Richard Haden creates trompe l!oeil sculptures out of wood, elevating the usually prosaic model, such as a battered bleach bottle, to the status of an art object. Leo Gulick photographs details, drenched in color, of objects such as boats and rusting machinery to create painterly, graphic abstractions. Both artists are represented by the Lucky Street Gallery in Key West. Haden is additionally represented by New York!s Allan Stone Gallery. Gullick and Haden, along with the other fellowship recipients, will participate in a show to be presented at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach from July 20th to September 9th.

The South Florida Cultural Consortium is an alliance of the arts councils of Palm Beach, Broward, Miami- Dade, Monroe and Martin Counties.

The recipients were selected during a two-panel tier process which included the participation of regional and national arts experts. Selection by the regional panel was totally anonymous, based solely on the quality of the artists' work as evidenced by slides or video/films submitted. The regional panel forwarded their recommendations to the national panel, which was comprised of David Cabrera, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Bill Fagaly, New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans; Theaster Gates, University of Chicago Arts Programs, Chicago; Kelly Gordon, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. All four national judges participated in the final recommendations.