Ernie Krivda Receives Lifetime Achievement Award

Tenor sax legend Ernie Krivda is the recipient of the 2009 Cleveland Arts Prize Lifetime Achievement Award.  Mr. Krivda studied clarinet at CIM in 1963 as a student of Alfred Zetzer, prior to going on the road as a tenor sax player with The Jimmy Dorsey Band.  [Mr. Zetzer (B.M. 1940) served as bass clarinetist with the Cleveland Orchestra for 36 years.]

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Cleveland Arts Prize News Release

Northeast Ohio Celebrates the 49th Annual Cleveland Arts Prize Event

On June 25, 2009, Northeast Ohio will honor the 2009 winners of the 49th annual Cleveland Arts Prize awards. Starting at 6:00 pm, the event will be held at the historic Hanna Theatre on East 14th Street in PlayhouseSquare. Previous winners will be introduced, and then this year’s winners will receive their medals and talk about their work and what inspires them as artists.

Dennis Barrie, former director of the Rock and Roll Museum and Hall of Fame and the Contemporary Art Center of Cincinnati, and 1st Amendment Defender, will host the program. A short performance will follow the presentation of medals, and then a reception to celebrate the Arts Prize winners will be held in the Hanna Theatre lobby.

Patron tickets cost $250 ($220 tax deductible), while general tickets are $50 ($20 tax deductible). Tickets will be held at the door, there will be open seating. For more information, call 216-321-0012 or visit info@clevelandartsprize.org.

Emerging Artist Award (40 and under): Amy Casey (Visual Arts)

Amy Casey works as the project coordinator for the Reinberger Galleries at the Cleveland Institute of Art, where she graduated in 1999 with a B.F.A. in Painting. She is included in an upcoming exhibition titled “There Goes the Neighborhood” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (June 5th-August 16, 2009). Recently featured in the quarterly national publication New American Painting, her work is represented by galleries in Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Her work was also recently featured on the cover of Pleiades, a nationally distributed literary magazine centered at University of Central Missouri. Some art experts rank her among the most accomplished painters of her generation currently showing anywhere in the U.S. She has already received a number of awards and grants, including the Katherine and Lee Chilcote Foundation Award for New Work and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award.

Mid Career Awards: Terry Schwarz (Design) and Thrity Umrigar (Literature)

Terry Schwarz: Since 2000, Schwarz has served as a senior planner at the Cleveland Urban Design Center, which was founded by Kent State University but located in downtown Cleveland. In 2005, she created the Shrinking Cities Institute at the Center to understand and address the implications of population decline and large-scale urban vacancy in Northeast Ohio. For her master plan of the Cleveland State University campus, she won an Ohio Chapter of the American Association of Landscape Architects Honor Award in 2005. Schwarz earned her M.A. in City Planning from Cornell University in 1991, and she has taught at KSU’s School of Architecture and Environmental Design as an Adjunct Professor since 2004.

Thrity Umrigar: Born in Bombay, India, Umrigar became a U.S. citizen in 1993. She earned her Ph.D. in English from Kent State University in 1997 and her M.A. in Journalism from The Ohio State University in 1985. She has published several books, including the novels The Weight of Heaven, If Today Be Sweet, and The Space Between Us, as well as her memoir, First Darling of the Morning. She has received 15 fellowships and awards, including a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book citation, finalist for the PEN/Beyond Margins Award, and a citation for The Washington Post’s Best Fiction of 2006. Currently, she is an Associate Professor at Case Western Reserve University, responsible for teaching courses in fiction, creative nonfiction, journalism, and African-American and American literature.

Lifetime Achievement Awards: Bill Brouillard (Visual Arts), Mort Epstein (Design) and Ernie Krivda (Music)

Bill Brouillard is a Professor of Art, Ceramics Department, at the Cleveland Institute of Art, where he has taught since 1980. He earned his MFA in Ceramic Art from The New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 1976. Currently, his collections are represented by more than 15 centers, including The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Detroit Museum of Art, The University of Southern Illinois, Tokyo National Museum, and Lerner Tower at University Hospitals Case Medical Center. He has also won numerous grants and awards, such as an Excellence in Design Award at the American Craft Museum, and the CIA Schreckengost Award for Teaching.

Mort Epstein, who will celebrate his 92nd birthday on May 25, 2009, has been producing engaging designs and works of art for more than seven decades. An exhibit and companion book, Mort Epstein: Sixty Nine Years of Design at Ninety, chronicles the evolution of Epstein’s visual style from the 1940s through the 1980s in hundreds of logos, annual reports, book designs, furniture, wood trimmings, and murals for corporate, industrial, and not-for-profit organizations. A native of New York and graduate of the Cooper Union School of Art, Epstein moved to Cleveland after WWII and worked in various design jobs, until founding his own firm, Epstein Design, in 1962.

Ernie Krivda is now in his fifth decade as a jazz performer. His peers and jazz critics alike acknowledge him as one of the world’s great tenor saxophone players and one of the jazz world’s most dynamic artists. Although his significant musical talent has taken him to the largest jazz stages, from Carnegie Hall to the Kool Jazz Festival, Krivda continues to call Cleveland home. He has been the subject of features and articles in international publications such as Down Beat and Jazz Times magazines. Additionally, he has won countless Cleveland awards, most recently the prestigious Tri-C Jazz Festival Jazz Legends Award.

Special Prizes

The Robert P. Bergman Prize: Michael J. Horvitz

Michael J. Horvitz, of counsel at Jones Day law firm, is one of Cleveland’s civic-minded and philanthropic citizens, who has distinguished himself as a passionate advocate for and leader in the arts on a regional and national level. As President and now Chairman of the Board of Trustees of The Cleveland Museum of Art, as well as Chair of the Building Oversight Committee, Horvitz has served as both a participant and leader in almost every phase of the museum’s unprecedented $350 million expansion and renovation, the largest cultural capital project in the history of the state of Ohio. He has received several prestigious awards for his work, including the Pillar Award for Community Service: Artistic Vision (2006), National Philanthropy Day Leadership Award (2002), and the Gries Family Award for Community Leadership from the Jewish Community Federation (1999). He holds an L.L.M. in Taxation from New York University and a J.D. from the University of Virginia.

The Martha Joseph Prize for Distinguished Service to the Arts Awards: Nina Freedlander Gibans, Charles Fee, and Stephanie Morrison-Hrbeck

Charles Fee was hired by the Great Lakes Theatre Festival as Producing Artistic Director in 2002, with the mission of restoring the theater to financial health and a place of theatrical prominence in Northeast Ohio. His innovative approaches to producing theater, including joint productions with the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, where he is also Artistic Director, have rescued GLTF from serious financial instability that once threatened the survival of downtown Cleveland’s primary classical theater since 1980. His recent efforts to lead a nearly $20 million campaign to renovate PlayhouseSquare’s Hanna Theatre into an intimate, audience-friendly space with the latest in high-tech production capabilities has helped revitalize the historic Broadway show house into a model for theater in the 21st century. In doing so, Fee has also energized GLTF’s future in its new home.

Nina Freedlander Gibans has, for the last ten years, spearheaded the search for a new home for the Cleveland Arts Foundation. As a board member of the CAF, she diligently worked to help the organization achieve its goals of serving as an intellectual force in preserving and telling the remarkable story of the region’s artists, past and present. In the 1970s, Gibans founded the Cleveland Area Arts Council and oversaw its pioneering efforts to enhance the city’s urban environment through a variety of public art initiatives. In 1976, she received the National Arts Management Award from Arts Management Magazine for her work as Executive Director of CAAC. Some, however, consider her tour de force project to be her role as curator of a series of public forums entitled “Cleveland’s Creative Essence, 1900-2000, The Distinctive and the Distinguished,” which resulted in a book that she authored, Creative Essence: Cleveland’s Sense of Place.

Stephanie Morrison-Hrbek grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Michigan with a BA in French Literature in 1975. She moved to Cleveland in 1978 to establish and direct Near West Theatre, where she now holds the title of Executive Director. One of her primary goals for NWT has been to enrich and transform the lives of thousands of children by using theater to improve their life skills, enhance their self-esteem, and broaden their horizons. NWT provides a creative, constructive outlet for children and teens during often-unsupervised hours. Participants rehearse up to four hours four times per week, and acquire valuable trade skills while preparing productions by learning how to use power tools, do carpentry, design lighting, etc. For three decades, she has offered free after-school and summer programs to approximately 1,200 participants annually, and affordable (and allocated donated) tickets to 4,400-5,000 attendees each year. She is currently working with the Gordon Square Arts District to move NWT into a permanent space that is accessible to the entire community.