The Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) is pleased to announce the artists selected to receive the 2009-10 Jerome Fellowship for Emerging Artists.  They are Steven Accola, Caroline Kent, Tony Sunder, and the collaborative of Tynan Kerr and Andrew Mazorol.

Designed to identify and support outstanding emerging artists in Minnesota, the Jerome Fellowship provides recipients with $10,000 stipends, public recognition, professional encouragement, and a catalog and exhibition at MCAD Gallery in the fall of 2010.  The fellowships are funded by a generous grant from the Jerome Foundation and administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Steven Accola's acrylic paintings hover between the poles of abstraction and representation, wedding the two with a dark palette of painterly gesture. Largely a self-taught artist, his work has been included in shows sponsored by Interact Center for Visual and Performing Arts and VSA Arts of Minnesota.

A graduate of the University of Minnesota's MFA program, Caroline Kent commemorates her experiences living in Romania in monumental shaped paintings.  While evoking dilapidated, graffitied architecture in palette and texture, the paintings open up possibilities of self-revelation in their fissures and layers.

The work of Tony Sunder, who received his BFA in painting from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, attempts to neutralize the language used to explain art's power. By employing pre-existing objects or symbols and minimally altering them, he creates situations where art skits between meaning and meaninglessness.

Tynan Kerr and Andrew Mazorol are collaborative painters whose figurative work evolves out of constant negotiation and occasional sabotage. Their working process is as uncertain as their subjects-ambiguous spaces filled with people of unknown origin and motivations. Kerr graduated with a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and Mazorol received his BA from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

This year's Jerome Fellows were chosen from a field of 292 applicants.  The selections were made by a panel comprising Kris Douglas, chief curator at the Rochester Art Center, Minn.; Michelle Grabner, professor and chair of the Painting and Drawing Department at the Art Institute of Chicago, Ill.; and Lane Relyea, associate professor of art theory and practice at Northwestern University, Ill.

The Jerome Foundation Fellowships for Emerging Artists is recognized as one of the outstanding Twin Cities foundation-based grant opportunities for visual artists.

Currently on view in MCAD Gallery is "MCAD/Jerome Artists 2008-09," the culminating exhibition for last year's recipients:  Evan Baden, Barbara Claussen, Kirsten Peterson, Benjamin Reed, and Lindsay Smith. The show runs through November 8, 2009.

The MCAD/Jerome Foundation Fellowship Program is administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.