The Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation announced last month that NMSA students Tilcara Webb (theater) and Gavin Laur (music) are the winners of its new Arts Writing Scholarship competition for the New Mexico School for the Arts (NMSA) Senior Creative Writing program! The winners were selected based on their writing entries inspired by the Luminous Flux 2.0: new + historic works from the digital art frontier exhibition at Art House, the Thoma Foundation’s public art exhibition space in Santa Fe. The Foundation initiated the Arts Writing Scholarship program for NMSA to support creative arts writing and reflection on the field of Digital Art.
The scholarship competition was open to senior college-bound students earning a minor in Creative Writing at NMSA. The recipients of the scholarships are Tilcara Gay Webb, the first place winner, and runner up Gavin Laur.
Tilcara Gay Webb received the $1,000 first-place scholarship for her essay about the technological relationship between art and writing inspired by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Method Random 4 (2014) (below) and its use of computer code. “I kept returning to the idea of the relationship between written code and art, and the prospect of translating one into the other,” said Webb. Webb, a Santa Fe native, is a senior Theater major at NMSA who plans to earn a B.A. or B.F.A. in Acting after graduation.
Gavin Laur received the $500 second-place scholarship for his essay about Siebren Versteeg’s LIKE (2014) (right). Laur, a senior Music major at NMSA, noted the parallel between melody and background accompaniment in music and the interaction between the two panels of Versteeg’s LIKE, which pairs a digital painting created by an algorithm with an image from Google’s reverse-image search tool. After graduation, Laur plans to study music and major in Piano Performance.
“The work with the Thoma Foundation has been transformative,” said Dr. Monika Cassel, the students’ instructor for the Senior Creative Writing Workshop and Acting Chair of Creative Writing and Literature at NMSA. “Students were able to engage creatively and intellectually with artists from around the world, having rich, collaborative conversations about cognition, perception, art, technology, and society. Their creative responses to the pieces in the Luminous Flux 2.0 exhibition grew into some of the strongest written work I have seen from these students.”
CONGRATULATIONS Tilcara and Gavin!!
About the Thoma Foundation
The Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation recognizes the power of the arts to challenge and shift perceptions, spark creativity and connect people across cultures. The Foundation lends and exhibits artworks from its collection and supports innovative individuals and pivotal initiatives in the arts. The Foundation’s public exhibition space in Santa Fe, Art House, is located at 231 Delgado Street and is openThursday – Saturday, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.
For more information, please visit www.thomafoundation.org.
A special thanks to Marilynn and Carl Thoma for their ongoing support of NMSA