Artist and poet George Quasha of Barrytown, New York is among those named April 6th to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2006, the only award this year in video art among the 187 awards in 78 different fields. Mr. Quasha, who has previously received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry, also works in other mediums as well — performance art, drawing, and sculpture, the latter the subject of his forthcoming book, Axial Stones: An Art of Precarious Balance, Foreword by Carter Ratcliff (North Atlantic Books: Berkeley), due out in July. The axial stones sculptures were exhibited last year at the Baumgartner Gallery in New York’s Chelsea district and will be part of the upcoming show of Hudson Valley artists, Manhattan Transfer, curated by John Weber for ZONE Chelsea Center for the Arts, opening April 20th in New York City.

His principal work in video art is Art Is, subtitled Speaking Portraits (in the performative indicative), for which he has filmed over 450 artists, in seven countries and seventeen languages, including visual artists, filmmakers, musicians, poets, dancers, etc. In this work he films just the face of the artist saying what art is. The work has been shown both as art installation a nd as single-channel work in museums, galleries, and art centers in several countries, from the Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame with a three-room installation of art is/poetry is/music is, to international biennials in Switzerland and Poland. In New York it has shown at White Box in Chelsea. He recently completed Myth Is, a similar compilation of mythologists, writers, scholars, artists, psychologists and poets talking about different understandings of myth. His other video art works include Pulp Friction, Axial Objects, and Verbal Objects.

His most recent work, in collaboration with Mythic Imagination Institute, is the Myth Is DVD. If you attended Mythic Journeys '06, you'll remember the documentary that played continuously outside the main programming room with marvelous thinkers like Michael Vannoy Adams, Rebecca Armstrong, Coleman Barks, Phil Cousineau, Meinrad Craighead, William Doty, Kristen Eckmann, James Flannery, Honora Foah, Matthew Fox, Ellen Hemphill, James Hillman, Sam Keen, Robin & Stephen Larsen, Margot McLean, Micheal Meade, Joyce Carol Oates, Ginette Paris, Laurie Patton, Huston Smith, Ulla Suokko and Robert Walter all speaking to the importance and understanding of myth in our modern world.

Part II includes interviews with 431 more amazing minds!

For the opportunity to view and order either one or both of these powerful documentaries, visit www.quasha.com.

His 14 books include poetry (Somapoetics, Giving the Lily Back Her Hands, Ainu Dreams [with Chie Hasegawa], Preverbs); anthologies (America a Prophecy [with Jerome Rothenberg], Open Poetry [with Ronald Gross], An Active Anthology [with Susan Quasha], The Station Hill Blanchot Reader); and writing on art (Gary Hill: Language Willing; with Charles Stein: Tall Ships, HanD HearD/liminal objects, Viewer).

He has taught at Stony Brook (SUNY), Bard College, the New School, and Naropa University. With Susan Quasha he is founder/publisher of Barrytown/Station Hill Press in Barrytown, New York.

Visit George Quasha on the Web
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