Arts faculty, students to be honored April 29

Creative arts faculty and students in disciplines spanning film studies, textile design, music and visual art will receive awards from the Arts Institute this spring.

Winners were chosen for excellence in creative inquiry, outreach and professional activities. The honorees for 2005 are:

Tino Balio, professor emeritus of communication arts, the Joyce J. and Gerald A. Bartell Award in the Arts.

An internationally recognized film scholar, Balio was the Arts Institute’s first director until his retirement last year after 40 years on the communication arts faculty. Under his guidance, the Institute now sponsors the annual Wisconsin Film Festival, interdisciplinary artist in residence programs that benefit both the university and larger communities, and more. Earlier in his career, he negotiated the acquisition of the United Artists archives of several thousand feature films, close to two million still photographs, publicity materials and many other documents for UW–Madison’s Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.

Catherine Kautsky, professor of music, Arts Institute Creative Arts Award.

Interdisciplinary performer, lecturer, scholar and teacher, Kautsky has been on the music faculty since 2002. Next year she will create three concerts for the UW–Madison Music Faculty Concert Series that will explore how the composers Arnold Schoenberg, Claude Debussy and Charles Ives were influenced by their cities, Vienna, Paris and New York, at the turn of the last century.

Diane Sheehan, professor of environment, textiles and design (ETD) and Emily Mead Baldwin-Bascom Professorship in the Creative Arts.

Inspired by mundane materials including foil and wire, Sheehan has exhibited her work more than 100 times over the course of her career. The co-author of two books, “Ann Sutton” (2003) and “Ideas in Weaving” (1989), she joined the ETD faculty in 1989. In 2006 she will create a body of work for a solo exhibition at the James Watrous Gallery in the Overture Center.

T.L. Solien, associate professor of art and Emily Mead Baldwin-Bascom Professorship in the Creative Arts.

The Art Institute in Chicago, Whitney Museum in New York and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis all hold Solien pieces. His courses in figure painting teach it as an investigation of contemporary concepts and methodologies of figuration. His next project will deconstruct images and themes in “Moby Dick” and two related works in a series of large-scale oil paintings and prints.

In addition to the faculty award-winners, three students also will be honored:

Xia Gao, MFA candidate in ETD; David and Edith Sinaiko Frank Graduate Fellowship for Women in the Arts.

Gao explores cultural identity and transformation through fabric “walls” that she stretches from floor to ceiling. She is planning her thesis exhibition, “Adaptation, Transition and Evolution,” for spring 2006.

Cedar Marie, MFA candidate in art, David and Edith Sinaiko Frank Graduate Fellowship for Women in the Arts.

Marie’s installations typically focus on issues of the body and notions of time. She plans her thesis exhibition for next April, and says it will consist of objects that she has transformed in some way.

Kristof Wickman, BFA candidate in art, Lyman S.V. Judson and Ellen Mackechnie Judson Student Award in the Creative Arts.

Wickman’s sculptures probe the widening gap between natural and synthetic worlds. His work reflects what he sees as the collective tendency to favor the synthetic.

These winners will be honored on Friday, April 29. Also being recognized at that ceremony will be 2005 Vilas Associates or H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowships in the creative arts, who received their awards from the UW–Madison Graduate School earlier this year: assistant professor of ETD Jennifer Angus; associate professor of English Amy Quan Barry; associate professor of art history Thomas Dale; and associate professor of dance Douglas Rosenberg.