Lambent: adj.: Flickering gently; Softly bright or radiant; Glowing; Marked by brilliance

August 27, 2007 –New York, NY– Tides Foundation’s Lambent Fellowship in the Arts has awarded $147,000 to seven New York artists for their artistic excellence and potential to add fresh voices to the art world of Metropolitan New York.

The Lambent Fellowship, now in its fifth year, aims to support diversity and stimulate New York’s cultural dialogue.  The Fellowship is awarded in three-year installments and is completely unrestricted; it is intended to support each fellow’s artistic expression in whatever way he or she chooses.

The following 2007 Fellows will receive a $21,000 award over the next three years: Nao Bustamante, Skowmon Hastanan, Rajkamal Kahlon, Ivan Monforte, Jennifer Monson, Clifford Owens, and Swoon.

The Lambent Fellowship in the Arts program supports visual and performing artists in all five boroughs of New York City.  A selection panel of artists and arts professionals made anonymous nominations to the Lambent Fellowship’s selection committee, who chose finalists to be considered by the Tides Foundation Board of Directors.

“The Lambent Fellowship program celebrates and fosters the intersection between art and social change,” explained Michelle Coffey, Senior Philanthropic Advisor at Tides Foundation. “The recipients reflect New York’s rich diversity and their works offer great insights into the role of art in critiquing, shaping and changing our ideas, our communities, and our society.  The Lambent Fellowship program pays tribute to artists who are making exciting and high quality work, while at the same time are in line with Tides Foundation’s mission of creating a positive impact on people's lives in ways that honor and promote human rights, justice, and a healthy, sustainable environment.”

About the Artists:

Nao Bustamante is an internationally known performance and video artist originating from the San Joaquin Valley of California, now residing in New York. Her (often precarious) work encompasses performance art, sculpture, installation and video. Bustamante has presented in Galleries, Museums, Universities and underground sites all around the world. Her work has been exhibited, among other locales, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Arts, and the Kiasma Museum of Helsinki. In 2001 she received the prestigious Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship and in 2007 named a New York Foundation for the Arts fellow. Currently she holds the position as Associate Professor of New Media and Live Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. 

Skowmon Hastanan, visual artist, creates work from a unique perspective relating to the immigrant experience occurring outside the United States. She moved from Bangkok to New York at the end of the Vietnam War. Her works derive from memories of the American military presence in Thailand and her experience growing up in New York City. The narrative involves the result of the political interaction between the USA and Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, and how it directly and indirectly resulted in the establishment of a sex trade, trafficking of person, and the creating of gender and racial stereotypes. Skowmon examines today's media's use of old clichéd Asian mystiques to sell sexual fantasy. Using images of mail-order brides and escort services that appear on the Internet and in classified ads, she explores feminine identity from these found images.

Rajkamal Kahlon, visual artist, interrogates the ideological positions of representation as they are linked to forms of racial and colonial authority. In her dialectical engagement with historical texts she critiques the will to "make" humans implicit in the visual practices backed by repressive regimes of power in part through the use of violent imagery framed by psychedelia and the human body turned grotesque through its traumatic encounters with colonialism, military rule and torture.

Ivan Monforte uses simple gestures and materials, as well as emotional language and content, as strategic tools to address themes of loss and mourning, representations of class, gender, race and sexuality, as well as the pursuit of love.  He often utilizes social sculptures and performance based videos in his work to challenge the viewers' relationship to art viewing, making and collecting.

Jennifer Monson creates dance systems and performances that arise from the confluence of environmental research and in depth artistic process. Her work explores concepts of wilderness in relation to the built and natural environments with a special focus on urban ecologies. Embodying contradictions inherent in the concept of nature, Monson's work re-negotiates relationships between art, environment, power, and place.

Clifford Owens makes art through photography, video, performance, installation and texts. His work has focused on the "social contract" of an art experience within an art institution, and the social function of a studio visit. Clifford was born in Baltimore,  Maryland in 1971 and he lives and works in Queens, New York.

Swoon is an artist whose work begins with figurative drawing, portraiture, and traditional print making techniques and extends to urban interventions and community-based collective experiments. Among other projects she has been wheat pasting an ongoing series of portraits on New York City streets for the past six years, and is currently involved in the Miss Rockaway Armada, a floating experiment in ecologically sustainable living practices, which travels the Mississippi River carrying theater, music, visual art and a variety of workshops. With each of these practices she is attempting to create a free, publicly available, and outward reaching context for the creation of and experience of contemporary art.