Trawick Best in Show artwork by Rex Delafkaran
Artwork from the annual Trawick Prize: Bethesda Contemporary Art Awards are on exhibit at Gallery B, Bethesda. The winners of the competition were announced Wednesday, Sept. 6 at the gallery. The exhibit of the finalist’s works will be on display now through Oct. 1.
The Gallery hosts an opening reception Friday, Sept. 8 from 6 to 8 p.m.
Rex Delafkaran of Washington, D.C. won the top honor with best in show and $10,000 prize. Charles Mason III of Baltimore, received $2,000 for second place. Stephanie Garon, also from Baltimore, received $1,000 for third place.
Megan Koeppel from Hyattsville, Md. was awarded the Young Artist Award and received $1,000.
Rex Delafkaran is an Iranian American interdisciplinary artist and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute. She uses movement and objects to explore ideas of failure and hybridity among bodies, objects, identities and language. Delafkaran has exhibited and staged performances at the NARS Foundation, Brooklyn, NY; Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; Panoply Performance Lab, Brooklyn, NY; Platform Art Fair, Athens, Greece; Satellite Art Fair Miami Miami; Southern Exposure Gallery, San Francisco, CA; and the Textile Museum, Washington, D.C., among others. She recently received a NARS Foundation International Artist Residency Fellowship and a Warhol Foundation Wherewithal Research Grant. She is also the co-founder and co-director of an artist-run project empowering artists to be both self-sustain and experimental through selling artist-made products and curating exhibitions.
Eight Regional Artists Named Finalists
The eight finalists include Rush Baker IV, Riverdale, Md.; Rex Delafkaran, Washington, D.C.; Stephanie Garon, Baltimore; Kei Ito, Baltimore; Megan Koeppel, Hyattsville, Md.; Giulia Livia, Baltimore; Charles Mason III, Baltimore; and Fanxi Sun, Richmond, Va.
The exhibit includes selected works of the finalists. Gallery B is located at 7700 Wisconsin Avenue, Suite E, Bethesda. Gallery hours for the duration of the exhibit are Thursday through Sundays from noon to 5 p.m.
About the Competition
The Bethesda Contemporary Art Awards were started by community philanthropist and activist Carol Trawick in 2003 as one of the first juried competitions for visual artists in the region. The judges for the awards included Brandon Morse, Associate Professor and Chair of the Art Department, University of Maryland; Jon-Phillip Sheridan, Chair of the
Photography and Film Department, Virginia Commonwealth University and Naoco Wowsugi, Associate Professor of Art, American University.
The judges for the awards included Larry Cook, Assistant Professor of Photography, Howard University; Carrie Fucile, Professor of Digital Art & Design, Towson University; and Noah Simblist, Associate Professor of Art and Chair of Painting and Printmaking; Virginia Commonwealth University.
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