Since the Kansas City Art Institute’s first art class in 1886, the college has continually celebrated the achievements of our talented students, faculty and alumni. Their success stories exemplify how artists, designers and scholars influence the world around us by experimenting with mediums, writing poetry that resonates and illustrating pictures that tell a different story. KCAI congratulates the following women, who have received noteworthy recognition for their outstanding artistic endeavors.
Ellen Carey ’75, Printmaking
Photographer
Andy Warhol Foundation for the
Visual Arts Grant
Experimental photographer and Associate Professor of Photography at the University of Hartford, Hartford Art School, Ellen Carey, who is celebrated for her avant-garde approach to materials, found her calling when she was a student at KCAI in the ’70s. Carey knew she was creative, but she couldn’t paint, draw or throw clay. She was in the KCAI Freshman Foundation program, which requires every student to explore numerous art mediums, when she picked up a camera and the magic happened. “I fell in love with everything about photography — the camera, the film and the processing. I loved the freedom and the autonomy that went along with it,” she said.
Since graduating from KCAI, she has had 55 solo exhibitions, 400 group exhibitions, site-specific installations, books, lectures and more. Her unique work has broken ground in the art world, especially her abstract, minimalist Polaroid Pulls & Rollbacks. An exhibit, Ellen Carey: Dings, Pulls, and Shadows, is on display through July at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth. At the end of 2017, The Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts awarded the Burchfield-Penney Art Center in Buffalo, New York, a $30,000 grant to support an upcoming retrospective, Picture Nothing: The Experimental Photography of Ellen Carey 1977-2017. The exhibit will open in October and run through February.
“It’s a great reality check to get this type of recognition. It’s kind of like receiving an Olympic medal or Oscar in my field,” said Carey. Learn more at ellencareyphotography.com.
Above: Pulls with Mixed & Off-Set Pods (2010), Ellen Carey. Collection of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (ACMAA) Fort Worth, Texas.
Anne Boyer
Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts
Cy Twombly Award for Poetry
Anne Boyer’s most recent book, Garments Against Women, explores everyday life themes like single motherhood, money struggles, and how to find time to stay true to oneself when you’re trying to just keep your head above the water. It felt so personal and intimate to her, that she stashed it away in a drawer. When it was finally published in 2015, she expected it to have a very limited audience. She was shocked when it resonated with so many readers and spent six months at the top of the Small Press Distribution bestseller list in Poetry.
Boyer was further surprised last fall when she received the inaugural $40,000 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, an organization founded by Jasper Johns and John Cage in the 1960s. Since she was secretly nominated by someone in the field, she didn’t even know she was a potential honoree. “I feel like I’ve won twice. First, it’s just amazing that a visual artist was so influenced by poetry that he established this generous award. It was also wonderful to be recognized for my personal contributions to the field,” she said.
Boyer has two additional books in the works: a collection of essays, A Handbook of Disappointing Fate, and The Undying, a personal account of her battle with highly aggressive triple negative breast cancer. Anne has been teaching liberal arts and inspiring students at KCAI since 2007. Find out more at anneboyer.com.
Gabbi Brandini
Senior, Illustration
2017 Will Eisner Scholarship Award
Gabbi Brandini’s fascination with prehistoric settings and characters and her use of comedy as a tool to explore the darker side of life caught the attention of the Society of Illustrators who awarded her the 2017 Will Eisner Award Scholarship. She was chosen from hundreds of applicants for the prestigious scholarship named after Will Eisner, one of the most influential comic artists of all time. “Receiving the award really boosted my confidence as an illustrator and made me realize that my work has merit. It also reassured me that I was taking the right path by pursuing a career in illustration,” said Brandini.
Now that Brandini is close to graduating (she’ll receive a B.F.A. in May), she looks back at choosing KCAI as “100 percent the best decision I could have ever made for myself.” She’s been inspired by the Illustration faculty and their dedication to the artistic growth of their students. “At KCAI, I truly learned how to be a good artist, and to embrace that identity. I did not grow up around artists or illustrators, and the art world was completely alien to me before, but now I feel like I belong to this worldwide community. It’s one of those things that feels right to me, at my core,” she said. See Brandini’s work at gabbibrandini.com.
