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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Date: August 22, 2007
Contact: Yvonne Stahr, Programs Information Officer
Phone:  (603) 271-0791; e-mail: Yvonne.m.stahr@dcr.state.nh.us
Photos available by request

  NH STATE ARTS COUNCIL NAMES NEW ARTIST FELLOWS

Concord, NH — The New Hampshire State Council on the Arts announces the names of five New Hampshire artists who will receive Individual Artist Fellowship Awards of $5000 each and two Fellowship Finalists who will receive $2500 each. This year’s recipients hail from Concord, Farmington, Rindge, Nottingham, Deerfield, Epping, and Newport.

Fellowships are awarded annually for artistic excellence and professional commitment, as judged by peers in each artist’s field.

Visual Arts Fellows

Megan Bogonovich, Sculptor, Concord
Megan Bogonovich, originally born in Northampton, MA, lives and works in the capital city as an adjunct professor of printing and ceramics at the NH Technical Institute. She also organizes student exhibitions and maintains the institute’s ceramics studio. In addition, she teaches a wide variety of eight to ten week art courses at the Kimball-Jenkins School of Art. In exchange for working as the studio technician, the school allows her the use of a small semi-private studio space and equipment.

Venues throughout the US where she has exhibited her work include the Guilford Art Center in Guilford, CT; the NH Art Institute; The Office Gallery in Huntington Beach, CA; Plymouth State University; the Archie Bray Summer Resident Show in Helena, MT; Feats of Clay XVII in Lincoln, CA; the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts in San Angelo, TX; the Clay Studio of Missoula in Missoula, MT; and at the University of California in Long Beach.

She holds an MFA in Ceramics from the University of Montana and received her BFA in Fine Arts at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. She has also attended Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY.

On the prospect of receiving a Fellowship, she says, “it would allow me to begin to create my own studio.” She is looking forward to getting her own kiln and wheel and creating a website to market her work. She also plans to work toward the goal of holding a significant exhibition of her work in NH.

Of her work she says, “The sculptures combine naturalistic and abstracted imagery to suggest the possibility of the real and the imagined cohabitating, a whimsical reality. Unusual growths, curious routes, unlikely pairings, strange predicaments, surprises and wonder, comfort in the unlikely.” She says she creates her sculptures in order to “question the safety of the environments and relationships we create. [The works] present scenarios about the comforts and limitations of our secure personal worlds…We are strongly motivated to seek out risk and change, while we wax poetic about our sweet homes.”

Alexandra de Steiguer, Black and White Photographer, Farmington
New York native Alexandra de Steiguer is based in Farmington. Since 1997 she has spent her winters as caretaker and sole resident of the Isles of Shoals. Of this unique experience, she says, “I can’t begin to express the growth I have experienced during this extended time alone amid rocks, sea and sky – simply as a human but, perhaps more significantly, as an artist.”

Her gelatin silver images, that she develops and prints herself, are printed one at a time in her darkroom. Her process is very slow and hands on, as she explains, “Making these images is a painstaking process that results in each image being a unique product of much experimentation and handling. In this technological age, having a tactile connection with the work is important to me.”

This is de Steiguer’s second Fellowship. Of her 2002 award she says, “Being an Arts Council fellow was crucial in opening doors of opportunity and was directly responsible for my work now being in the permanent collection at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park.” Even her required report back then motivated her to organize her thoughts and writings into a scripted slideshow presentation. It was time well spent. She explains, “This work has become the basis of a book that will not only make my work more available to those who can’t afford to purchase it (a dearly held priority for me), but also will help propagate awareness of my work professionally.”

Along with the recognition and motivation that a fellowship provides, De Steiguer anticipates the opportunity to get her work published and purchase necessary equipment upgrades.

Performing Arts Fellow

Douglas Irvine, Composer, Sound Artist, Instrument maker, Rindge
Douglas Irvine of Rindge originally hails from Park Ridge, IL. He has been a resident of the state since 2002. He composes, performs, produces and engineers his musical compositions and, in many instances, makes his own instruments, which are modeled on ancient Middle Eastern instruments.

He holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he concentrated on experimental music composition and instrument making. Since 1992, he has created sound installations and live performances for nine museums in Boston, Seattle and Chicago. He has created soundtracks for websites, CD-ROMs, audio tours, and radio documentaries. He has performed live and been interviewed on public radio stations in New Hampshire, Seattle, Chicago, and Hawaii.

Among the awards he has received are an audio equipment grant from Digidesign Corp, an artist Fellowship Grant in the media arts category from the Illinois Arts Council, and a Brown Traveling Fellowship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

He explains the focus of his work, “the exploration of cultures, traditions and time periods far beyond my own. Deep antiquity often provides the framework from which I create contemporary music. As an instrument maker, I have reconstructed dozens of ancient Middle Eastern musical instruments. The sounds of those instruments offer a rich musical palette resonating back over 5000 years in history.”

The composer mixes these ancient sounds with computers, software and other 21^st century sound tools, and transforms them into a music that is completely contemporary.

Literary Arts Fellows

James Patrick Kelly, Science Fiction Writer, Nottingham
James Patrick Kelly has authored five novels and more than 60 published stories, essays, reviews, poetry, plays and planetarium shows.  His novella BURN was awarded the 2007 Nebula Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America.  He is also a two-time winner of the World Science Fiction Society's Hugo Award for his novelettes Think Like A Dinosaur and Ten to the Sixteenth to One.

Other books include Strange But Not a Stranger (2002), Think Like a Dinosaur and Other Stories (1997), Wildlife (1994), Heroines (1990), Look into the Sun (1989), Freedom Beach with John Kessel (1986) and Planet of Whispers (1984). His fiction has been translated into sixteen languages. He has also co-edited two anthologies, Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology (2006) and Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology (2007). 

He writes a column on the internet for Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and is on the faculty of the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. He posts two weekly podcasts: Free Reads and James Patrick Kelly's Storypod. He is the vice chair of the Clarion Foundation, which oversees the Clarion Science Fiction Workshop. He served on the New Hampshire State Arts Council from 1998 to 2006 and was Chairman from 2004 to 2006. He has also served on the board of the New England Foundation For The Arts.

His childhood interest in history has found an outlet in the plays he has written. He has authored I Have Not Yet Begun to Fight about John Paul Jones, and The Duel, a what-if account, that takes as its point of departure the famous incident between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. He has a third play in the works about the Booth brothers, both well-known actors, one of whom made his mark on history as Abraham Lincoln’s assassin.

After his graduation from Notre Dame, where he majored in English, he worked in public relations. The turning point for him was attending the six-week Clarion Science Fiction Workshop in Maine in 1974 where he wrote his first commercially successful story. He says that he considers the intense work at Clarion as equivalent to an MFA. In 1990 he was invited to join the faculty of Clarion and now serves on their board as assistant chair.

While working with young writers he stresses the importance of submitting work to publications that publish their type of writing. Lamenting the increasing inclination toward technology, he offers this advice: “make sure that you read the publications that you’re sending your work to. The more appropriate the work to the publication, the higher your chances.” 

This is the second NH Fellowship that James Patrick Kelly has received. His first was awarded in 1996.

Christopher Locke, Poet, Epping
Laconia native Christopher Locke believes that poetry should be as accessible as possible and wishes to reach as many people as he can through gatherings where all can share their own poetry. He wants his poetry to act as a catalyst to encourage poetic expression among his audience members. In describing his ideal and the format of his report to the NH community, he says, “I’d like to offer local citizens the opportunity to also read their poems, irregardless [sic] of education, ability, background, or allegiances. Not only would folks read their own poems along with me, but they’d also get the opportunity to take the podium and discuss poetry and poetics and how the art informs their lives.”

The Fellowship, he says, will help provide crucial support to his family as he enters a period of part time work. He says, “I always believed that poetry had the ability to save my life, and over the years, I think it has, but never has it had the opportunity to do so in such a real and tangible way.”

Of his work, he says, “My poems are about finding a way into truth through redemption. … my poems detail the struggle that exists in being a fallible human being, and those small moments of epiphany that lead the speaker away from the intangible and into the redemptive. My poems, though not obsessed with finding ‘a way out,’ as it were, are definitely concerned with discovering another chance. This may include another chance with a relationship, or even just another chance at living. Hope is not a four letter word, and my poems aim to resolve the common discourse between the spirit and the flesh with the least amount of casualties.”

Fellowship Finalist Award Recipients 

Elizabeth Longfellow, Creative Nonfiction Writer, Deerfield
Nashua native Elizabeth Longfellow is working on a memoir entitled Backward Heart. The funds she will receive as a Fellowship Finalist will grant her the precious time she needs to complete a book length manuscript for publication. She is one of the first writers to earn her degree in the new MFA in Creative Nonfiction program at the University of NH and wants to finish the manuscript before committing herself to a teaching job. As she says, “Writers who teach find it very difficult to do their own writing.” At UNH, she had the opportunity to write under the guidance of memoirist Meredith Hall. From her, Longfellow says that she “learned to pick out significant moments that inform the part of the story you’re trying to tell.”

As one who had written non-fiction and read fiction her entire life, she was able to finally meld the two together in Backward Heart. This work, which she wrote as her MFA requirement, “reads” very much like a novel with clearly drawn characters and well developed situations. It seems logical for her to tackle a work of fiction next.

Longfellow summarizes her memoir as “the story of an ordinary good girl set loose to negotiate the journey out of her ‘50s NH childhood, through the civil unrest of the 60’s and her call to social activism. It will require of her a shotgun marriage, the death of one child, the birth of another, a coming to terms with her enigmatic mother and her hapless young husband. She will, in this story, break hearts, break laws and break the marriage, too, because at every juncture there are choices she never imagined and consequences she never intended.”

John Lunn, Flute Maker, Newport 
John Lunn has been studying music since the age of eight and began studying the flute at age 13.  Soon after graduating high school, the Toronto native began playing the flute professionally and apprenticed to a flute-making company.

He premiered his first “art nouveau John Lunn flute” at the National Flute Association convention in New Orleans in 1989 and a few years later his flutes began selling worldwide. In 1991, Lunn moved to Newport, New Hampshire and published Hands On, a newsletter for flutists with performance injuries. In 1993 he created several flutes in 14K gold with master flute maker Albert Cooper and shortly after became a juried member of the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen (LNHC). He has been master flutemaker for the Massachusetts based Burkart-Phelan Flute Company in Acton and the William S. Haynes Flute Company in Boston. He has received the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen’s “Best in Show” designation for their Creative Hand II exhibit.

Each Lunn flute is unique and tailor-made to fit his client’s anatomy. This effectively relieves the occupational injuries to which flutists are prone.  “I found that I could relieve their symptoms, if not eradicate their stress completely, by making a flute that perfectly fit their hands...” John Lunn has built 150 flutes to date that are currently being played worldwide.

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A total of 79 professional artists applied this year for the highly competitive awards. Out-of-state and in-state panelists with expertise in visual arts, crafts, music, theatre, literature, film, and media arts reviewed all of the submissions for artistic excellence and professional commitment.

 For more information about the Fellowship program as well as Fellows past and present, visit the State Arts Council’s website at www.nh.gov/nharts. The deadline to apply for a 2009 NH Fellowship is April 11, 2008.

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Last updated: August 28, 2007