Residencies » Visiting Artists & Writers » 2008 » July » Shelby Hearon

WriterShelby Hearon

Public Reading/Slide Talk Date: 07/10/2008

Shelby Hearon was born in 1931 in Marion, Kentucky, lived for many years in Texas and New York, and now happily makes her home in Burlington, Vermont. She is the author of sixteen novels, including Life Estates, which was a Hallmark-CBS film, Ella in Bloom, and Owning Jolene, which won an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award.

She has received an Ingram Merrill grant as well as fellowships for fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and has twice won the Texas Institute of Letters fiction award. She has taught at numerous writing programs including the University of California at Irvine, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Colgate and Middlebury, and served on the Texas Commission of the Arts and the New York State Countil on the Arts.

About her writing, New York Newsday has said: "What Jane Austen is to courtship, Shelby Hearon is to marriage. Chronicler and surgeon, she is compassionate but cool, ironic and intelligent."

NARI WARD

Vermont Studio Center Visiting Artist: 08/12/2008

Nari Ward (b. Jamaica, 1963) received a BA from Hunter College in 1991 and an MFA from Brooklyn College 1992. Exhibitions include two Whitney Biennials, Venice Biennale, and Documenta XI. Ward has also received commissions from the United Nations, and the World Health Organization, and has collaborated with Ralph Lemon, Bill T. Jones and Toni Morrison. Grants include American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Endowment for the Arts,New York Foundation for the Arts, John Simon Guggenheim and Pollock Krasner Foundations. Ward currently lives in New York, and teaches at Hunter College.

WOLF KAHN

In Back of the Vermont Studio Center, 2001.
Oil on canvas. 52 x 66 inches.

Wolf Kahn is a Founding Trustee of the Vermont Studio Center and an annual Visiting Artist for the past 20 years. As such he has had a major role in the Center?s success since its founding in 1984.
Born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1927, Kahn immigrated to the United States in 1940 where he studied with the well-known teacher and abstract expressionist Hans Hoffman. From 1956 ? 1995 he showed at the Grace Borgenicht Gallery, and now shows at Ameringer and Yohe in New York and in galleries all over this country and abroad.
His work is in many private and public collections including the Metropolitan Museum, and the Whitney Museum in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Hirshhorn in Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum.
He has received a Fulbright, a Guggenheim, and American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. He is member of the National Academy of Design, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He lives in New York and spends summers and autumns in Vermont.