Hopper Prize: Spotlight on the Artists
The Hopper Prize has a strong history of supporting contemporary visual artists through their biannual artist grant program. This is a great program that provides unrestricted financial support to working artists of all backgrounds and disciplines. In the Spring and Fall, 5 artists each receive awards, for a total of 10 grants per year. On top of this, support is extended to an additional 30 artists per cycle who are selected for a shortlist.
The process for potentially winning one of these awards is straightforward: you simply submit your portfolio through the organization’s website. After the submission period closes, The Hopper Prize collaborates with institutional curators to review your submission and select grant winners and finalists. The curatorial collaboration is a strength of the program because it gives you the opportunity to put your work in front of high level curators.
The growing archive of artists who have received grants as well as those featured on the shortlist is an impressive overview of the incredible range of contemporary art practices currently happening across the globe. Below we have profiled 6 recent finalists whose work shows the depth of talent represented by the growing community of artists who have been given a platform by this contemporary organization.
To learn more about grant offerings from The Hopper Prize, visit their homepage.
To explore work by more grant recipients and finalists, visit their archive of past winners.
Read in-depth interviews with recent winners and finalists in their Journal Insights into Contemporary Art.
Follow The Hopper Prize on Instagram @hopperprize.
Sarah Tortora (b. 1988, New Haven, CT) received an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2013, and served as a Lecturer of Contemporary Art at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia while in attendance. From 2016-2018, Sarah mounted solo exhibitions at NAPOLEON (Philadelphia, PA), GRIN (Providence, RI), Reynolds Fine Art (New Haven, CT), and CAS Arts Center (Livingston Manor, NY). Sarah has been an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and Ox-Bow School of Art, among others. She was the 2015-2016 Alice C. Cole '42 Fellow in Studio Art at Wellesley College, and from 2017-2018 was a yearlong artist-in-residence as the Visual Arts Coordinator at Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont. Tortora currently lives/works in Philadelphia.
Senem Oezdogan is a Brooklyn based artist and a graduate of FIT New York (2010, Design & Illustration). Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally including Platform Projects, Cooler Gallery, The Curator Gallery, Dattner Gallery, Gotham West, PULSE Contemporary and most recently at the Editions/Artists' Books Fair (E/AB Fair) in New York.
Dana Oldfather is a painter who has exhibited nationally in galleries and museums including Library Street Collective, Detroit, Zg Gallery, Chicago, Kathryn Markel Fine Art, New York, and The Butler Institute of American Art, and the McDonough Museum of Art in Youngstown. She was awarded the William and Dorothy Yeck Award for Young Painters, two Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards, and residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and Zygote Press. Oldfather was twice featured in the New York Times and published in the book The Art of Spray by Lori Zimmer of Art Nerd New York. Oldfather’s work was recently exhibited at art fairs in Houston, Miami, Palm Beach, and New York, including Art on Paper. Her paintings are internationally collected privately and can be found in many public and corporate collections in the US including the Pizzuti Collection with The Joseph Editions, Eaton Corporation, MGM International, The Cleveland Clinic, and the prestigious Progressive Art Collection. Dana Oldfather currently works and lives just outside Cleveland, Ohio with her husband Randall and young son Arlo.
Alvin Ong (b. 1988, Singapore) is a graduate of the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, UK (2016) and the Royal College of Art, London, UK (2018). His paintings playfully combine diverse visual vocabularies, culminating in surreal bodily configurations suspended between moments of pleasure and pain. At the age of 16, he became the youngest winner of the UOB Painting of the Year Award, Singapore (2005). He was awarded a residency in 2017 with the Royal Drawing School, as well as the 2018 Chadwell Award. His works have been exhibited at the Singapore Art Museum (2007, 2012, 2013), Asian Civilizations Museum, Singapore (2010), Peranakan Museum, Singapore (2015), Northampton Contemporary, UK (2017), National Portrait Gallery, UK (2018), and Royal Academy of Arts, UK (2019). His works are collected by the ILHAM Gallery, Malaysia, the Ingram Collection, UK, and the Victoria & Albert Museum (Print Collection), London, UK.
Louise currently lives and works in Melbourne. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Art with 1st Class Honours from RMIT University in 2016, during which she undertook a 6-month university exchange at the Utrecht School of the Arts in the Netherlands. She has exhibited both in Australia and abroad, most recently at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane (2019) and the NARS Foundation Gallery in New York (2019). Recent achievements include: the Kyneton Residency provided by the Macfarlane Fund (2017), the SEVENTH Emerging Writers program (2017), semi-finalist in the Brett Whitely Travelling Art Scholarship (2019), semi-finalist in the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize (2019), finalist in the churchie national emerging art prize (2019), and an artist residency at the NARS Foundation in New York (2019).
Su A Chae is a South Korean visual artist, currently based in the Midwestern United States. She received an MFA in painting from Indiana University Bloomington and an MA and a BA in Business from Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea. She attended a painting workshop at Penland School of Craft with full scholarship. She also completed the Tyler School of Art Summer Painting & Sculpture Intensive. Her work has been exhibited nationally at venues such as the Painting Center in New York, Icebox Project Space in Philadelphia, Harrison Center for the Art in Indianapolis, Ivy Tech John Waldron Arts Center in Bloomington and Young Space (online). Her work has been featured in Studio Visit Magazine, Herald-Times, Friend of the Artist, Create! Magazine and forthcoming Maake. Su A Chae will be an artist-in-residency at Vermont Studio Center this winter.
