Architect Neil Denari Among United States Artists 2009 Fellows

United States Artists (USA), the national grant-making and advocacy organization, announced the recipients of 50 USA Fellowships for 2009, totaling $2.5 million, at a celebration last Monday at The Broad Stage in Santa Monica, CA. This event marks the fourth consecutive year of the USA Fellows program, which annually awards fifty unrestricted grants of $50,000 to artists of all disciplines from across the country. The USA Fellows for 2009 hail from 18 states and range in age from 28 to 82. Chosen for the caliber and impact of their work, they include contemporary experimenters and traditional practitioners—Pueblo potters, feminist performance pioneers, cutting-edge fashion designers, independent radio artists, and folk musicians, among others.

“Artists fuel the nation’s cultural vitality and illuminate the issues and complexities of our time,” said Susan V. Berresford, USA board chair and former president of the Ford Foundation. “Yet many of our country’s finest artists struggle to make ends meet. Now more than ever, we need a resource like United States Artists to invest in working artists and promote their contributions to society.”

In the category ‘Architecture and Design’, the USA Fellows for 2009 are:

Neil Denari
USA California Community Foundation Fellow, Los Angeles, California

Denari established his architecture practice in 1988 and in the following three decades has become a leading voice in the pedagogy and practice of contemporary architecture. His work has evolved from unbuilt theoretical projects to a growing number of realized commissions that illustrate that progressive ideology is buildable. From his earlier machined aesthetic to his more recent employment of smooth sinuous modeled forms, Denari’s architecture has evolved into a matured ideology that has influenced numerous generations of younger architects. A teacher since 1986, Denari is the former director of SCI-Arc (1997–2001), and is currently a professor at UCLA’s School of Architecture.

Laura Kurgan
USA Rockefeller Fellow, New York, New York

South African-born Laura Kurgan received her degree in Architecture from Columbia University in 1988. In 1995, she established her own studio—Laura Kurgan Design—an interdisciplinary design practice based in New York City. Her methodology takes data network information and uses it as a visual device to inform and educate the general public on social issues and their physical implications to the built environment. Over the span of Kurgan’s career her projects have evolved from small, forward-thinking graphic installations to larger, three-dimensional built environments that merge data information with graphics and architecture resulting in spatial conditions that become visible networks. Since 2005, she has been the Director of Visual Studies and the Director of the Spatial Information Lab at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.

Rick Lowe
USA Booth Fellow, Houston, Texas

Rick Lowe is a twenty-first-century Renaissance man. He is an artist, architect, urban designer, developer, businessman, and activist who is a catalyst for social outreach for underserved neighborhoods. Lowe’s early founding of Project Row House in Houston’s Third Ward in 1993 became the template for others to follow on how to bring local people together to engage their own creative energies and aesthetic values to produce a “collective expression” to reinstate a community. Lowe’s socially engaged methodology helps individuals excavate talents that they might have either forgotten about or just lost sight of. An example of his progressive thinking can be seen in a recent concept for a series of small businesses that draws on local individual’s abilities—such as homemade cookies and laundry service—and turns them into emerging noted talents and proprietors.

Kate Mulleavy and Laura Mulleavy
USA Target Fellows, Pasadena, California

Sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy established their label Rodarte in 2005, and in less than five years they have become one of the most important fashion houses to emerge from the United States. While not formally trained in fashion—Kate studied art history and Laura studied literature at UC Berkeley—they bring a range of knowledge beyond the normative history of fashion to the industry. They fold this experience into their meticulous craftsmanship celebrating the female body in ways that are reminiscent of classic couture coupled with art and sci-fi imagery. Their one-of-a-kind gowns and ready-to-wear knits are highly regarded and push the boundaries of what the avant-garde can be in American fashion today. Rodarte has received numerous awards and accolades for their fashion-forward thinking and their work is already in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The founding of the Los Angeles-based United States Artists in 2005 was prompted by the Urban Institute’s study, Investing in Creativity: A Study of the Support Structures for U.S. Artists, which found that while 96% of Americans appreciate the arts, only 27% believe that artists contribute to the good of society. A recent study conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts discovered that American artists were unemployed at twice the rate of all professionals in 2008. This rate would be even higher if not for the sheer number of artists leaving the workforce and therefore not counted.

Images: United States Artists/Neil M. Denari Architects