2004 Winner announced for The Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers

The Baum 2004: Katy Grannan
October 7 through December 5, 2004

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Berkeley, CA: The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) is proud to announce the 2004 recipient of The Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers. Through the generosity of Glenn and April Bucksbaum, this $10,000 cash grant honors a talented and innovative photographer at a critical moment in the development of his or her career. This prestigious award is presented to a promising American photographer who has not yet had a comprehensive one-person museum exhibition. It is the largest national award among grants available in photography, and is the only award in the United States to single out 'emerging' photographers for support.

"We are very pleased to announce the recipient of the third Baum Award, Katy Grannan, who was chosen from an impressive list of nominees," says Glenn Bucksbaum, President of The Baum Foundation. "We hope this award will provide Katy with additional support to pursue her creative work."
Katy Grannan, a Brookyln-based photographer, creates black and white and color portraits of people who have answered ads she places in regional newspapers calling for "Art Models." Her frank and mesmerizing images communicate empathy, reference photojournalism, fashion, and classical art history, and invoke the work of Diane Arbus and August Sander.

"Thank you. Thank you. Thank you," says Ms. Grannan. "This award couldn't have come at a better time. It will be an enormous help financially to me. It is a morale boost and an affirmation of what I am doing. All of these things are so important to emerging artists." As part of the Award, a photograph by Grannan will enter the BAM/PFA collection, and her work will be on exhibit in the Theater Gallery from October 7 through December 5, 2004. Grannan will be honored at an Award reception at the museum on Thursday, October 7, where she will discuss her work with author and literary portraitist Ryan Harty.

"Katy Grannan's photographs are sexy and provocative, empathetic and elegiac. She achieves these starkly contrasting emotional responses in the viewer because she empowers her subjects to select their own poses, locations, and states of undress. Like the viewer, Grannan stands at an awkward distance, implicated yet free," says Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, Phyllis Wattis MATRIX Curator at BAM/PFA. "It continues to be a great honor to work with Glenn and April Bucksbaum to reward and encourage emerging American photographers at a salient moment in their burgeoning careers."

Born in 1969 in Arlington, Massachusetts, Katy Grannan received her M.F.A. from Yale University in 1999, after earning her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (1991) and M.A. from Harvard University (1993). Grannan's photographs were included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Solo exhibitions of her work include a summer 2004 show at the Arles Photography Festival, Arles, France; as well as exhibitions at 51 Fine Art, Antwerp, Belgium (2001 and 2003); Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York, and Salon 94, New York (both 2003); Lawrence Rubin Greenberg Van Doren, New York (2000); and Kohn Turner Gallery, Los Angeles (2000). In addition to this year's Whitney exhibition, recent group exhibitions include Open House: Working in Brooklyn at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (2004); Moving Pictures at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (October 2003 – May 2004); Girls Night Out at The Orange County Museum of Art, California (2003); Casino 2001 at the Stedelijk Museum Voor Actuel Kunst in Gent, Belgium (2001); Legitimate Theater at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2001); and many other exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe.

Works by Katy Grannan are included in the collections of Bard College, Annandale on Hudson, New York; International Center of Photography, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Previous awards include a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant in 1999.

Grannan also works successfully as a commercial photographer. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Fortune magazine online, Harper's Bazaar, and other publications.

Glenn and April Bucksbaum of The Baum Foundation established The Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers in January 2001. The Award winner is selected by a panel of jurors led by MATRIX curator Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson. The 2004 jury included Eungie Joo, Director and Curator of REDCAT (Roy & Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) in Los Angeles; independent curator Nora Kabat; Richard Misrach, one of the primary landscape photographers working today; and Bob Riley, Director and Curator at the Nelson Gallery at UC Davis. The jurors reviewed the many submissions for the 2004 Baum Award and met in late June at BAM/PFA to choose this year's winner.

Artists are nominated for the Award by 25 curators of contemporary art and photography, and directors of alternative photography spaces from across the U.S., each of whom recommends two artists. These 50 photographers are then invited to submit slides of their work for review by Zuckerman Jacobson and the other jurors. Members of the Baum Foundation do not participate in the selection of the curators, artists, or jury who choose the Award winner.

The Baum Foundation created the award out of the conviction that artists contribute in powerful ways to the health and vitality of our society, and that artists who have the support and resources necessary to pursue their creative work are essential to a dynamic cultural environment. The first Baum Award was presented in 2001 to documentary photographer Deborah Luster in conjunction with the Friends of Photography: Ansel Adams Gallery in San Francisco. The winner of the 2003 Baum Award was Luis Gispert.