Palm Beach County artists Nathaniel Katz and Bonnie Seeman received Visual and Media Artists Fellowship awards by the Cultural Council of Palm Beach County.
Katz, an interdisciplinary artist, and Seeman, a ceramic artist, are two of 14 recipients awarded the honor this year by the South Florida Cultural Consortium.
Katz, a resident of Jupiter, born in Canada and raised in Israel and the U.S., earned a bachelor’s degree with honors from the Rhode Island School of Design in digital media. While there, he was the recipient of a graduate fellowship and a graduate award of excellence.
Katz was awarded the best new media prize at the Boston Young Contemporaries in 2008. In 2009, he participated at the Lugar, a Dudas artist residency program in Cali, Colombia.
“Nathaniel Katz presents his artworks as an exchange,” said Ian Berry, associate director and curator of the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. “Katz makes art as a gift, as a component of teaching or as an intimate collaboration between father and son. It almost doesn’t matter if we are invited in at all.”
Katz defines his work as, “provoking the possibility of reverberation beyond the moment of encounter through storytelling, gifts and the dissemination of desire.”
Seeman, of Boca Raton, earned a master’s degree from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Miami.
She has participated in numerous international and national exhibitions including: Art Basel in Switzerland, the World Ceramic Biennale in Korea and Arco Art Fair in Spain.
Her works are in many public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Mint Museum of Craft & Design and the Carnegie Museum of Art. She has received several grants, such as the Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial award and two Florida individual artist fellowships.
She has demonstrated and lectured throughout the U.S., and her work is widely published. Seeman serves on the board of Watershed Center and has served as a Florida Arts Fellowship panelist.
“My work blends the macabre with the beautiful, which acts as a metaphor for the fragility and resiliency of life,” Seeman said.
The fellowships are conferred at either the $15,000 or $7,500 level. Katz and Seeman both received $7,500.
An exhibition featuring the works of the 14 recipients is on view at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, One East Las Olas Blvd., through Sept. 1.
The South Florida Cultural Consortium Visual and Media Artists Fellowship program is a cooperative project funded in part with the support of the boards of county commissioners of Broward and Miami-Dade counties, and the Cultural Council of Palm Beach County.
ABOVE: Bonnie Seeman and Nathaniel Katz
