Norton Museum Hosts Emerging Artist Studio Residencies

The Norton Museum of Art will host the five winners of Palm Beach County’s inaugural Emerging Artist Prize. 

The recipients — all artists who have worked in the industry for less than 10 years — will participate in a nine-month mentorship program with an established arts professional matched to each recipient’s needs and oeuvre. They’ll also be given a $3,000 stipend along with a four-week stint at The Norton’s studios. 

Announced earlier this year, the winners of the prize are Sitki Dogan, Laura Tanner, Kevin Small, Jamie Rodriguez and Hodaya Louis. 

Dogan, a Lake Worth Beach resident, grew up in Turkey, where he received a degree in industrial design. His passion, though, was street art. He began pursuing it professionally in 2016 and he’s created countless mind-bending murals since.

Tanner hails from Ohio and is now based in Boca Raton. She melds deep research — oral histories, artifacts, and manuscripts, ethnographic in nature — with the craft of an artist to create collages of memory, using ink, pens, mics and cameras in her multimedia work.

Kevin Small of Jupiter combines the surreal with the human in his work as a filmmaker and photographer, blurring the line, constructed, between worlds within and worlds without. 

Rodriguez is an installation artist, a sculptor, who uses no found materials in his work. He makes it all, wets clay and fashions it with his hands, molds it into a fallen leaf, a mural or a mule, anything necessary for his green and grey, simultaneously naturalistic and postmodern work. 

Based in Loxahatchee, Louis is an Afghani-American, the daughter of Jewish parents from different hemispheres. Her work — mostly sculpture — doesn’t dwell on such contradictions, but instead seeks to transcend them, to create “an infinite, unspeakable language.” Art.

The Emerging Artist Prize that they each received is sponsored by The Cornelia T. Bailey Foundation. 

The award is offered as part of a wider initiative in Palm Beach’s arts community: The Cultural Council for Palm Beach County’s Year of Extraordinary Support, or YES!. The Council managed to raise $12.6 million from the county government and a wealth of private donors, making it the most successful campaign in The Council’s 47-year history. 

The funding comes off the back of last year’s unprecedented slashing of the entirety of Florida’s arts funding. 

Just a few days ago, following last year’s backlash, Mayor DeSantis approved some funding for the arts in the forthcoming annual budget.

Even so, with the help of YES!, the five emerging artists are creating work under both fiscal realities.

Learn more at norton.org