UO Associate Professor of Art Anya Kivarkis is one of five Oregon artists named Hallie Ford Fellows in the Visual Arts for 2016. She was among 156 applicants. The honor, presented by The Ford Family Foundation, comes with a $25,000 unrestricted award.

Above: Anya Kivarkis. Photo by Sabina Poole.

Kivarkis serves as head of the jewelry and metalsmithing area in the Department of Art, in the UO School of Architecture and Allied Arts. She is the only artist selected this year who does not live in Portland.

The five arts professionals who served as jurists determined that each recipient is at a pivotal moment of potential transition in his or her career and an infusion of resources now may help to catalyze each artist’s practice in transformative ways.

“These new awardees represent a range of mediums, many of them concentrating on the intersection between several, to create entirely new ways of viewing the world visually,” says Anne Kubisch, president of The Ford Family Foundation.

Kivarkis is a practicing artist in jewelry, metalsmithing, and sculpture. For the past ten years her practice has evolved through the replication of jewelry from archives of history, the internet, and film.

“Throughout my work, I have focused on making mutated copies of jewelry from moments of economic recession that are coupled with massive amounts of collective, insatiable consumer desire,” her artist’s statement notes. “When they are interpreted from images, these objects get lost in translation and are inevitably compromised fragments when returned to bodies in real space.”

For the past two years Kivarkis has been developing a new body of research examining the depiction of jewelry in films, creating a series of objects and images that is currently mounted in a two-person exhibition at INOVA in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Evolutions of this work are also included in the Portland2016 Biennial and a solo exhibition with Sienna Patti Gallery in Lenox, Massachusetts.

Her work has been collected by individuals, foundations, and museums on both coasts and in New York. Kivarkis is represented by Sienna Patti as well as Galerie Rob Koudijs in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

She has exhibited in the Pacific Northwest, Ohio, Texas, Washington, Wisconsin, and New York, and abroad in France, the Netherlands, and Canada. She has received a number of awards, including most recently the Fund for Faculty Excellence Award from the UO and the Individual Artist Award from the Oregon Arts Commission, both in 2014. She was a nominee of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award in Art, New York, in 2009 following her receipt of the National 2006 Emerging Artist Award in 2006 by Sienna Patti Gallery. She earned an MFA from the State University of New York.

The other 2016 fellows are Karl Burkheimer, Wendy Red Star, Blair Saxon-Hill, and Lynne Woods Turner, all of Portland.

The fellowships are one of seven program components of The Ford Family Foundation Visual Arts Program established in memory of Hallie Ford, a cofounder of the foundation. Other components include artists-in-residence programs in Oregon and out-of-state; support for exhibitions, catalogues, and other forms of documentation; small capital projects; grants for unanticipated career opportunities; bringing curators and critics from outside the region to Oregon for studio visits and community dialogue; and providing funding to acquire seminal works by Oregon visual artists to preserve access to them in the public realm.

The foundation is the sole funder of this program but partners with Oregon's leading visual arts educators, gallerists, and museum and arts professionals in certain aspects of program delivery.

The Ford Family Foundation was established in 1957 by Kenneth W. and Hallie E. Ford. Its mission is “successful citizens and vital rural communities” in Oregon and Siskiyou County, California. The foundation is located in Roseburg, Oregon, with a scholarship office in Eugene.