Winners Announced in the 2021 Miami University Young Painters Competition
The winner of the $10,000 William and Dorothy Yeck Purchase Award was Kirk Maynard of Jersey City, New Jersey for a portrait titled Serenity #2. Julia Leggent of Lincoln, Nebraska was awarded the $2500 second-place award for Cutting Ties, a finely detailed painting of a severed ponytail. The $2,000 third-place award was received by Emily Strong of Fountain Hill, Pennsylvania for Cling.
The 2021 finalists for the Young Painters exhibition include Katie Butler, Akron, Ohio; Noor Chadha, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Chao Ding, Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Julia Leggent, Lincoln, Nebraska; Kirk Maynard, Orange, New Jersey; Andrew Stephen Norris, Gainesville, Florida; Cal Rice, Boston, Massachusetts; Rajab Ali Sayed, Hollywood, California; Emily Strong, Fountain Hill, Pennsylvania; and Erin Wright, Los Angeles, California. Alternating between representational/realism and non-representational painting, this competition assures a prominent national role for Miami University, rewarding and inspiring the creativity of talented young artists. The Young Painters Competition exhibition is on display in the Hiestand Galleries on the Miami University, Oxford Campus between February 16 and 25, 2021.
The juror for 2021, Kelly Baum, is the Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Curator of Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she has worked since 2015. Baum has held curatorial positions at the Princeton University Art Museum (2007–15), the Blanton Museum of Art at University of Texas at Austin (2002–2007), and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2000–2002). She has organized dozens of exhibitions, including Carol Bove (2006); Nobody’s Property: Art, Land, Space (2010); New Jersey as Non-Site (2013), for which she received a Warhol Curatorial Research Fellowship; Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason, 1950–1980 (2017); The Roof Garden Commission: Alicja Kwade, ParaPivot (2019); and The Facade Commission: Wangechi Mutu, The NewOnes, will free Us (2019). She also co-curated Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, 1963–2017 (2018). Her writing has been widely published in journals such as October and Art Journal as well as anthologies like Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics (2005). She received her Ph.D. from the University of Delaware in 2005, and was a 2018 fellow in the Center for Curatorial Leadership. Kelly Baum is the Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Curator of Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she has worked since 2015. Baum has held curatorial positions at the Princeton University Art Museum (2007–15), the Blanton Museum of Art at University of Texas at Austin (2002–2007), and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2000–2002). She has organized dozens of exhibitions, including Carol Bove (2006); Nobody’s Property: Art, Land, Space (2010); New Jersey as Non-Site (2013), for which she received a Warhol Curatorial Research Fellowship; Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason, 1950–1980 (2017); The Roof Garden Commission: Alicja Kwade, ParaPivot (2019); and The Facade Commission: Wangechi Mutu, The NewOnes, will free Us (2019). She also co-curated Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, 1963–2017 (2018). Her writing has been widely published in journals such as October and Art Journal as well as anthologies like Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics (2005). She received her Ph.D. from the University of Delaware in 2005 and was a 2018 fellow in the Center for Curatorial Leadership.
