Bruce Gagnier Receives John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship

Lori Bookstein Fine Art is pleased to announce that Bruce Gagnier has been awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial FoundationFellowship 2016.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded Fellowships to a diverse group of 178 scholars, artists, and scientists in its ninety-second annual competition for the United States and Canada. Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, the successful candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants.

About the artist:

Long fascinated by the human figure, Bruce M. Gagnier is largely a self-taught artist. His clay sculptures, which from the beginning have been both the form and content of his work, draw on his memories of the sculptural figures and Renaissance drawings in many museums here in the U.S. and abroad, as well as from his experiences working from the live model. The life-size figures he makes today are inspired by those memories and guided by his imagination. After receiving a BA in Art History from Williams College in the Spring of 1963, Gagnier had his first full time immersion in sculpture, painting, and drawing at the Skowhegan School of Art. He continued drawing studies in the fall of that year in the teaching studio of Nicolas Carone on 14th Street and 6th Avenue in New York City. From 1964 to 1966, he was an assistant in the studio of Peter Agostini, where he helped that artist fabricate his abstractions in plaster while working toward his MFA in Painting at Columbia a degree which he received in 1967. His honors include an award from the Ingram Merrill Foundation (1993), an Award of Merit from the Institute of Arts and Letters (2014), and election to membership in the National Academy of Design (2004). The artist has been represented by Lori Bookstein Fine Art since 2003. The gallery has mounted five solo shows of the artist's work in addition to his inclusion in numerous group exhibitions. In addition to his studio work, Gagnier has been teaching part-time at the New York Studio School since 1986.

About the award:

Guggenheim Fellowships are intended for men and women who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts. Candidates must apply to the Guggenheim Foundation in order to be considered in the competition. The Foundation receives between 3,500 and 4,000 applications each year. Although no one who applies is guaranteed success in the competition, there is no prescreening: all applications are reviewed. Approximately 200 Fellowships are awarded each year. During the rigorous selection process, applicants will first be pooled with others working in the same field, and examined by experts in that field: the work of artists will be reviewed by artists, that of scientists by scientists, that of historians by historians, and so on. The Foundation has a network of several hundred advisers, who either meet at the Foundation offices to look at applicants' work, or receive application materials to read offsite. These advisers, all of whom are themselves former Guggenheim Fellows, then submit reports critiquing and ranking the applications in their respective fields. Their recommendations are then forwarded to and weighed by a Committee of Selection, which then determines the number of awards to be made in each area. Occasionally, no application in a given area is considered strong enough to merit a Fellowship. The Committee of Selection then forwards its recommendations to the Board of Trustees for final approval. The successful candidates are announced in early April.

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