NYFA honors two Skidmore artists

Two artists with close ties to Skidmore have received grants awarded by the New York State Foundation for the Arts (NYFA).

Fiber artist Janet (Ginger) Ertz, a museum educator at the College?s Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, and painter Josh Dorman, a 1988 Skidmore graduate, were among the 134 artists who this year received fellowship grants of $7,000 for excellence in disciplines ranging from fine and digital arts to film, literature, printmaking, and more. According to the NYFA, the unrestricted grants may be used for ?everything from art materials to rent?which is welcome news for recipients. Artists have been strongly impacted by the economic crisis.?

Ertz, a Schenectady resident, makes outsized sculptures out of pipe cleaners?the flexible, fuzzy sticks that are also popular as craft materials?which she braids, weaves, coils, wraps, and knits into forms of fantasy and realism. Her work appears in prestigious regional shows and galleries including the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center in Vermont and the Albany International Airport's Art and Culture Program. Her 2007 Soft Chandelier, currently on view in the Albany Airport gallery, has been praised for its elegance, humor, and playfulness, and noted for its eight-foot diameter; a pearl-gray sculpture called Shell (2007) measures more than four feet across.

Ertz stumbled upon her unusual medium while designing an outreach program for the Tang Museum, where she directs the popular Family Saturdays art programs; the ?suitcase programs? that carry exhibition-related art workshops to regional schools; and other educational activities. Ertz, who buys pipe cleaners by the thousand-count and stocks them in a rainbow of colors, says, ?There?s a kind of humor, hominess, comfiness to them, and a childlike quality too, because we associate them with kids.? Ertz plans to use the NYFA grant to rent studio space.

New York-based artist Josh Dorman also works in an unusual medium: antique maps, on which he paints and inks ?playful works that feel as though Klee has met Kandinsky,? as the Los Angeles Times said. Sometimes Dorman highlights the maps? delicate topographic markings; in other works, such as Of Biblical Proportions (2007), he paints over the map?s markings, creating vistas of volcanoes, animals, trees, microscopic animals, solar systems, Lilliputian cities, and more. Says Dorman, ?I paint in order to see things that would not exist if I did not paint them.?

An oil painter during his campus years, Dorman earned an M.F.A. and taught at a private school and Skidmore?s Summer Six art program before being inspired to apply his childhood interest in drawing to two antique maps he picked up at Lyrical Ballad Bookstore in Saratoga Springs. Since then, his distinctive paintings and collages have been shown nationwide; he is represented by galleries in Connecticut, New York City, and Los Angeles. Says Dorman, ?The NYFA award will help with art and life in general, and will help fund my stay at Yaddo,? where he is currently preparing new work for a solo exhibition in spring 2010 at the Mary Ryan Gallery in Chelsea, N.Y.

The New York Foundation for the Arts, which was founded in 1971 ?to empower artists at critical stages in their creative lives,? each year provides more than $1 million in cash grants to individuals and small organizations. Since the fellowship awards began in 1985, NYFA has awarded more than $22 million to some 3,688 artists at all career levels. Previous recipients include poet Billy Collins, theatre director Julie Taymor, artist Barbara Kruger, and others, including subsequent winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award, the Academy Award, Guggenheim fellowships, MacArthur Foundation fellowships, and other honors.