Artscape was cancelled for the second year in a row, but the five finalists for the 2021 Janet and Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize will be displaying their artwork at the Walters Art Museum.
This year marks the return to in-person viewing of Sondheim Artscape Prize finalists’ work after the 2020 exhibition was moved online due to coronavirus-related restrictions.
Jurors selected five finalists whose work will be displayed May 27 through July 18.
The Walters will announce the winner of the 2021 Sondheim Artscape Prize during an award ceremony in July. The winner will be awarded a $25,000 fellowship to help further the career of a visual artist or visual artist collaborators.
Multidisciplinary artist Tsedaye Makonnen weaves together her identities as a Black mother of her 10-year-old son, a birthworker, and a daughter of Ethiopian immigrants. Her work, which primarily focuses on migration and intersectional feminism, uses materials such as light, shadow, and reflection.
Makonnen is a recipient of a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. She has shown her light monuments in exhibitions at the August Wilson Cultural Center, National Gallery of Art, and the UNTITLED Art Fair, according to her website.
Hoesy Corona’s “Sunset Moonlight” exhibition spans 10 years of artistic production.
Corona, who describes himself as “an uncategorized queer Latinx artist of Mexican descent,” creates art spanning installation, performance, and video. His work frequently examines themes of queerness, race, class, gender, nature, isolation, celebration, and the climate crisis.
Jonathan Monaghan produces “otherworldly objects and narratives” through prints, sculptures and video installations that explore “anxieties associated with digital technology and consumerism,” he says on his website.
Monaghan has participated in exhibitions at The Sundance Film Festival, The Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, and The Palais de Tokyo in Paris. His work is also part of public and private collections at The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Washington D.C. Art Bank Collection.
Hae Won Sohn, a visual artist and craftswoman from Seoul, South Korea, uses “studio-artifacts” in her work, such as broken molds and material remnants. She says on her website that her process makes metaphorical references to “archeological procedures and geographical phenomena” as she explores deconstruction, reconstruction, form, and object history.
Sohn’s work has been featured in exhibitions at the Emmanuel Barbault Gallery in New York City; the Gray Contemporary in Houston; Kyung-In Museum of Fine Art in Seoul; and more.
“I do have both this pride and guilt as an artist because we’re creating new ideas into forms, something visible,” Sohn said in a video on the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts’ Instagram page. “But at the same time in that process, we’re creating so many things that are getting trashed or thrown away, so I try not to believe in what I see in the objects at the moment, but also consider the potentials of what I can see in the future.”
Born in Nassau, Bahamas, interdisciplinary artist Lavar Munroe uses painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation art to create “hybrid forms that straddle the line between sculpture and painting,” he says on his website.
Munroe was included in Prospect.4: The Lotus in Spite of The Swamp triennial, curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, in New Orleans; and the 12th Dakar Biennale, curated by Simon Njami, in Senegal. His work has been part of group shows at the National Gallery of Bahamas, Nassau; Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco; the Virginia Museum of Modern Art; and more.
The Walters will hold artist talks with each of the finalists in conversation with Dany Chan, co-curator of the Sondheim Artscape Prize exhibition and Assistant Curator of Asian Art at the Walters.
Artist talks will be from 5:30-6 p.m. each day with Munroe on June 10, Corona on June 17, Makonnen on June 24, and Sohn on July 1. Monaghan gave his artist talk on May 25.
There will also be a separate exhibition during the summer of 2021 for the works of semifinalists who did not move on to the finals.
The Walters is open from 1 to 8 p.m. on Thursdays and from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays.
