Winner announced for
The Baum: An Emerging American Photographer Award

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Berkeley, CA: The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) is proud to announce this year's winner of The Baum: An Emerging
American Photographer Award. This prestigious award of $10,000 is presented to a promising American photographer who has not yet had a comprehensive one-person museum exhibition. The winner of the 2003 award is Brooklyn, New York-based Luis Gispert. A small exhibition of Gispert's work will be presented at BAM/PFA in the fall, opening September 25 and running through November 30, 2003.

Glenn and April Bucksbaum of The Baum Foundation established The Baum Award in January 2001. Artists are nominated for The Baum by a panel of twenty-five curators of contemporary art, photography curators, or directors of alternative photography spaces from across the U.S., each of whom nominated two artists. This group of fifty artists were then invited to submit slides of their work to a jury led by Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, Phyllis Wattis MATRIX Curator at BAM/PFA, and composed of Ralph Rugoff, Director of the Wattis Institute at the California College of Art and Craft, and Cornelia Butler, Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Members of the Baum Foundation do not participate in the selection of the curators, artists, or jury who select the prize winner.

"I am delighted to announce the winner of this year's Baum Award," says Glenn Bucksbaum. "The goal of this award is to give support and recognition to an emerging photographer so they can continue to pursue their life's work. We are especially delighted to be presenting this award within the highly creative framework of the MATRIX Program for Contemporary Art at BAM/PFA."

"It is a privilege to win this award," says Luis Gispert. "The award could not have been more timely and will allow me to complete a new body of work I'm currently working on."
"The impact that financial support can have on the lifelong career of an emerging artist is immense," says Zuckerman Jacobson. "We are honored that the Baum Foundation has chosen to partner with us on this endeavor."

Luis Gispert graduated from the MFA program at Yale in 2001 and participated in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, where he showed costumed cheerleaders juxtaposed against a monochrome green-screen in poses evocative of Baroque paintings. His most recent work expands his cast of characters to include, among other things, overweight and middle-aged costumed figures placed in elaborately staged, interior tableaux.

The first Baum Award was presented to documentary photographer Deborah Luster in 2001 in conjunction with the Friends of Photography: Ansel Adams Gallery in San Francisco, California. Luster was also the recipient of the 2000 Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize awarded by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Subsequent to The Baum Award, Luster received the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship awarded by the San Francisco Foundation.