Zach Meisner, acrylic paint/medium stretched over acrylic and fiberglass mesh on MDF and Masonite , 10 x 9.5 x 4.5 inches, 2017
Alumnus and Core Lecturer Zach Meisner (MFA Studio Art, 2017) has been selected as one of 30 artists awarded the 2017 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Grant. Each grant recipient is awarded an unrestricted grant of $20,000 to produce new work and push the boundaries of their creativity.
The awards go to visual artists working in the fields of painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, video, craft, and new media. Meisner is a painter interested in the expanded conditions of painting and the direct materiality of painted surfaces. In his recent work, he stretches thick layers of acrylic paint over assemblages to form small, handheld painting objects.
Jeannie McKetta, a UT Austin doctoral candidate in Art History, wrote the catalogue essay on Meisner for the 2017 MFA thesis show, Trouble, writing, "In order to speak of individual works one must attempt to describe them, a task made difficult by their off-hue color palette and their unrecognizable forms-shapes that tend to be as volumetric as they are planar, geometric as they are biomorphic, and playful as they are constructivist."
The recipients of the Tiffany Foundation Biennial grants were chosen from a pool of 156 people, who were nominated by artists, critics, museum professionals, and foundation trustees. The seven-member jury was made up of Phong Bui, cofounder and artistic director of the Brooklyn Rail; Ruth Estevez, the director and curator of REDCAT Gallery in Los Angeles; Alison de Lima Greene, a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Chrissie Iles, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art; artist Charles LeDray; artist Kerry James Marshall; and Bruce W. Pepich, the executive director and curator of Collections at the Racine Art Museum in Wisconsin.
The full list of recipients can be found in the press release.