2005-2007

CHESTER ARNOLD (Sonoma) is deeply committed to painting as a vital language and craft, and uses his content to explore the environmental and political life of our times. He has exhibited since the mid-eighties, and his recent solo exhibits include the Catharine Clark Gallery Reconstruction, Sonoma Valley Museum of Art Destinies Manifest, Salt Lake Arts Center, San Jose Museum of Art In Memoriaum, and Tacoma Art Museum; and group shows at Pasadena Museum of Art, Palo Alto Cultural Center, Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, Tamarind Gallery at the University of New Mexico, Hempel Fine Arts in Washington, D.C., and Galleria Milan in San Paulo, Brazil, among others. His work has been written about in the San Francisco Chronicle, Artweek, San Jose Mercury News, and Artforum. He has a MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (1987) and teaches drawing and painting at the College of Marin. *Artist biography at time of award.

THOMAS CHANG (San Francisco) is a photographer who received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (2000) where he received the David S. McMillan Memorial Award. He is also the recipient of a J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Award, a Jury Award from Artadia (formerly known as The Art Council, Inc.), a MFA Studio Award from the Headlands Center for the Arts, and a Murphy Fellowship from The San Francisco Foundation. His works have been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions at Southern Exposure, Gallery Landing, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Bay Area Now 3, SF Camerawork Same/Difference, Andrea Schwartz Gallery Chromogenic Prints, GenArt/SF Emerge, Charles H. Scott Gallery in Toronto American Artists, and M.Y. Art Prospects in New York Absence/Presence. Currently he is a docent at Angel Island Immigration Station, where his work examines the use of photography as “document” in the way exotic representations are created through tourism. *Artist biography at time of award.

AMY FRANCHESCHINI (San Francisco) is a new media artist working with notions of community, sustainable environments, and the conflicting rituals of humans and nature. Her work manifests “on-” and “off-line” worlds in the form of dynamic websites, installations, and printed matter. Her work has shown in solo exhibitions at the University of the Pacific, Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco Fiction of Mass, RAMP Gallery in New Zealand We Are All Meteorites, Electronic Orphanage in Los Angeles Utopia, Gallery 16 in San Francisco Tention, Sapporro Art Park in Japan Oguchi Happening, and the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco SF Fashion Show. Recent group shows include the California Biennial 2004 at the Orange County Museum of Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Whitney Biennale 2002, among others. Franceschini received a BFA from San Francisco State University (1992) and a MFA from Stanford University (2002). In 1995 she founded Futurefarmers, a vehicle for bringing together multidisciplinary artists to create new work. She currently teaches New Media courses at the San Francisco Art Institute and Stanford University. *Artist biography at time of award.

PAUL KOS (San Francisco) is a sculptor whose work includes video, installations, and public art. Since 1969 his work has been shown internationally and domestically in group and solo exhibits. A 2003 show, Everything Matters, Paul Kos, A Retrospective, was exhibited by the Berkeley Art Museum. This exhibition traveled to the Grey Gallery in NY, the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, and the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati. Among his commissions are Poetry Sculpture Garden (with poet Robert Hass) in San Francisco and Tunnel/Chapel (with Isabelle Sorrell) at the di Rosa Art Preserve in Napa, CA. He has been reviewed in The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. Among his grants and awards are a Flintridge Foundation Grant, six National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the Wallraff-Richartz Museum in Cologne, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, among others. He has a MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (1967) where he currently teaches in the New Genres Department. *Artist biography at time of award.

GEORGE KUCHAR (San Francisco) began making films in the 1950’s with his twin brother Mike, and since then he created over 200 films and videos in every format known. Active in the underground film movement in the early 1960’s, his titles include Hold Me While I’m Naked, Corruption of the Damned, Color Me Shameless, and Lust for Ecstasy. With the advent of 8mm camcorders in the 1980’s he jumped formats and produced a body of works including video diaries, dramas, and portraits of places that include Vile Cargo, Fill Thy Crack with Whiteness, Kiss of the Veggie Vixon, and The Migration of the Blubberoids. His solo exhibitions include the San Francisco International Film Festival, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Andy Warhol Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Chicago Underground Film Festival (Lifetime Achievement Award), and The American Film Institute (Maya Deren Award for Independent Film and Video Artists). With his brother Mike he co-authored a memoir, Reflections from a Cinematic Cesspool (Zanja Press, 1997), and they were both recently honored at the New York Film Festival with a retrospective of their early Super-8mm films. He taught filmmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute and passed away in 2011. *Artist biography at time of award.

JOSH LAZCANO (San Francisco) is a mixed media artist whose work combines an edgy street sensibility with self-irony. His work has been exhibited at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery Untitled Show, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Ten By Twenty, Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture which traveled to the Orange County Museum of Art, Gazonrouge Gallery in Athens, Greece The Sneeze 80 x 80, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the 3 More Gallery in Brooklyn Todd James Presents. His work has been written about in numerous publications including Stephen Powers’ The Art of Getting Over (St. Martin’s Press, 1999). He has an Associate Degree in Art from Skyline College (1996). *Artist biography at time of award.

MADS LYNNERUP (San Francisco) bases his work on simple ideas and actions that are primarily conceived through sculpture, photography, performance, and video. His recent shows include the Orange County Museum of Art The California Biennial 2004, Bergstulb Projekte in Berlin Something in Between, Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco 17 Reasons, Suite 106 Gallery in Torino Artissima, Riga Art Hall in Latvia The Project, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery Construct 3, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Grapefruit, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Slowdive, and GenArt/SF New Fangle 2001. His work has been written about in Artweek, The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, and Flash Art International, among others. He is the recipient of numerous awards including The Bay Area Visual Arts Award 2002 presented by New Langton Arts. His works are in the permanent collections of the Miami Museum of Art and the San Jose Museum of Art as well as private collections in the U.S. and Europe. He has a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (2001). *Artist biography at time of award.

LOURDES PORTILLO (San Francisco) is a filmmaker whose works focus on the search for Latino identity and include Las Madres: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Columbus on Trial, The Devil Never Sleeps, and Senorita Extraviada. Her work has screened in numerous domestic and international film festivals including Sundance, San Sebastian, Toronto, and Sydney as well as the American Film Institute and New Directors/New Films. Her work has also been shown at major American museums including the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as well as being aired on public television nationwide. There have been retrospective screenings of her work at the Fine Arts Museum in Berkeley, the Cineteca National de Mexico, Buenos Aires Museo de Arte Moderno, Stanford University, and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. Among her numerous awards and distinctions are Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, Distinguished Documentary Achievement Award from the International Documentary Association, Women of Vision Award from Amnesty International, three Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and five National Endowment for the Arts grants. She has a MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (1978). *Artist biography at time of award.

RIGO 23 (San Francisco) is an interdisciplinary artist known for large-scale public artworks where he appropriated traffic sign imagery and invested it with poignant ecological and political messages. He has had solo exhibits at Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco, Artists Space in New York, IT Park Gallery in Taipei, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago, Chile, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Gallery 54 in Gotheborg, Sweden, and The Lab in San Francisco. His commissioned and mural work is in public spaces in Porto, Portugal, Havana, Cuba, Belfast, Northern Ireland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Among his awards are the Biennial Award from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the SECA Art Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Best Public Art Project of the Year from The San Francisco Bay Guardian. Public collections holding his work include the di Rosa Preserve in Napa, California, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His work has been written about in The San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angles Times, The New York Times, and Mother Jones Magazine, among others. He has a MFA from Stanford University (1997). *Artist biography at time of award.

CLARE ROJAS (San Francisco) is a mixed media artist who also creates films, record albums, and performances. She has presented her work in solo and group shows at Deitch Projects in New York Table Turners, the Belkin Satellite Gallery in Vancouver, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago Doing my Day, White Columns in New York East of the Sun West of the Moon, the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco Outerspace, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia Scratch Off the Serial. Her films have screened at the New York Underground Film Festival, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Big Muddy Film Festival, and the Chicago Underground Film Festival. She has performed at Noise Pop and the In the Street Festival in San Francisco, and at the Material Clothing Company in Tokyo. She has released four record albums under the name “Peggy Honeywell.” She has a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2002). *Artist biography at time of award.

PHILLIP ROSS (San Francisco) is a sculptor known for his installations using diverse organic materials including fungus, shellfish, and table scraps, which he transforms into sculptural artifacts. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at the Catherine Clark Gallery in San Francisco Lineaments of Gratified Desire, the Biennial of Electronic Arts in Perth, Australia, at Machine in Los Angeles Organized, Vox Populi in Philadelphia Flipping the Bird, GenArt/SF New Fangle, the Oakland Museum Mycological-Fair, and the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco’s Annual Juried Show. Among his awards are The Art Council Grant, the Bay Area Visual Arts Award 1996 presented by New Langton Arts, and artist residencies at The Exploratorium and the Headlands Center for the Arts. He has a MFA from Stanford University (2000). *Artist biography at time of award.

CHRIS SOLLARS (San Francisco) is an installation artist who graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Sculpture (1998) and received a Skowhegan Fellowship from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His recent group and solo shows include Exit Art in New York The Choice, the Mercer Union in Toronto Placecards, New Langton Arts in San Francisco Closed Circuit, the Berkeley Art Museum Fast Forward II, Art Basel Miami Beach Free Spirits Artist Lounge, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art Bjorn Again, and the Soap Factory in Minneapolis Your Heart Is No Match for My Love. His work has been written about in the SF Weekly, NY Arts Magazine, and The New York Times, among others. Sollars’ work is in the collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and the Miami Art Museum. He is also the director and curator of 667 Shotwell, an artists’ project space. *Artist biography at time of award.