ALBANY TOWNSHIP — The Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, based in Rockland, has announced that Wade Kavanaugh of Albany Township and Stephen B. Nguyen of New York City, are the recipients of the foundation’s inaugural $25,000 fellowship.

The award is given to a Maine artist working in the visual arts in recognition of exceptional original work that adds to Maine’s renowned cultural lexicon, according to the foundation’s website.

Kavanaugh and Nguyen will be granted an exhibition at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland and will be invited to present a public lecture.

“For the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation to give such a large fellowship puts Maine on the map in terms of individual art awards,” Kavanaugh said.

The Ellis-Beauregard Foundation was created by artist John David Ellis of Rockland in 2015 to support the arts and preserve and share the work of Ellis and his late wife, Joan Beauregard.

The foundation is directed by Donna McNeil, who was executive director of the Maine Arts Commission for 17 years.

Kavanaugh said McNeil was very active in getting the word out about the fellowship, and the result was a field of more than 200 applicants in the first year of the award.

He and Nguyen, who have been artistic partners since 2005, applied for the fellowship last fall and were notified of their win in December.

With Nguyen based in Brooklyn and Kavanaugh in Maine, they have grown accustomed to long-distance collaboration when planning the sculptural installations they are commissioned to create.

Both are looking forward to Nguyen’s planned relocation to Portland and are excited to be doing a project together in Maine.

The pair met when Kavanaugh was living in Brooklyn and they both rented workspaces in the basement of a studio building. Kavanaugh was a sculptor and Nguyen a painter when they decided to combine their efforts to create room-sized art installations almost entirely from paper.

Their first collaboration was an installation called “Striped Canary on the Subterranean Horizon” at the Map Room, a former nonprofit art space in Portland.

In the years since, they have created a body of work that ranges from large sculptural objects to warehouse-sized environments that suggest layers of earth, an old-growth forest, or the flow of a glacier.

Their artwork bridges the natural and human-built environments, and their site-specific installations have been placed in galleries and museums from Idaho to the Czech Republic.

In 2015, prior to the opening of The Gem Theater in Bethel, which is co-owned by Kavanaugh and his wife, Beth Weisberger, Kavanaugh and Nguyen filled one of the former Casablanca building’s theaters with an installation that represented the mass and movement of a glacier.

They recently designed and built the dramatic sculptural set for choreographer Ivy Baldwin’s experimental dance performance “Keen (Part 2)” at the Abrons Arts Center on New York’s Lower East Side.

The preparation for each project, including brainstorming ideas and creating three-dimensional sketches and models of the space where the art will be installed, can take months, much longer than the actual installation, which is done on site in days or weeks.

Using a free computer program called Google SketchUp, Nguyen is able to create an exact three-dimensional model of the space where the art will be created, Kavanaugh said.

The artists are unsure of the timing and exact details of the installation they will create for the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland.

In 2016 the center, which began in 1952 as an artist cooperative, completed a $5 million capital campaign and moved into a new building in downtown Rockland, designed to take advantage of the indirect north light that is ideal for displaying art.

The size of the project will depend on the gallery space available at the CMCA, Kavanaugh said, noting that the fellowship’s generous award allows the artists to focus on the creative part of the process.

“Typically, fundraising and grant-writing make up a lengthy part of each of our projects, so we’re very thankful to the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation for making the project at CMCA possible,” he said.

“In Response to Shoshone Falls,” a work by artists Wade Kavanaugh of Albany Township and Stephen B. Nguyen of New York City, was installed at the Art Center of Sun Valley in Ketchum, Idaho, in 2012. The artists were recently chosen for the first $25,000 Ellis-Beauregard Foundation Fellowship. (Stephen B Nguyen photo)

Copy the Story Link