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Miami faculty, graduate student receive OAC grants

04/08/2009

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“St John’s” by Miami art professor Ellen Price (paper plate lithography, 16’ x 10’), one of 12 prints Price submitted for an OAC Individual Excellence Award.

Kay Sloan, professor of English and Ellen Price, professor of art, have been awarded Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council (OAC). Also honored is Dorothy Maxwell Goepel of Cincinnati, who earned a Miami master's degree in English with a concentration in creative writing. The award to each is $5,000.

Sloan, who supervised Goepel’s master’s thesis, says receiving the OAC the same year as her student “makes the award more deeply rewarding for me, personally.”

The OAC approved 59 awards totaling $300,000 in late February. Individual Excellence Awards are peer recognition of creative artists for the exceptional merit of a body of work that advances or exemplifies the discipline and the larger artistic community. These awards support artists’ growth and development and recognize their work in Ohio and beyond in 13 different disciplines. The process is competitive: only about 8 percent of applicants are granted awards.

Sloan, who joined Miami’s faculty in 1984, will use the fellowship to complete research and writing of a collection of interlocking stories set in New York between the 1930s and 1970s. She says, “The main characters, an ordinary Jewish couple swept up in the exuberant idealism of Communist ideology in their youth, annually attend an adults-only socialist camp in the Adirondacks… This collection will look at the lives of ordinary families who saw the Party as a lively, daring intellectual and social arena.” One of the central stories, “A Stain on the Sofa,” appeared in Fiction Magazine last fall and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Sloan’s earlier two novels, Worry Beads and The Patron Saint of Red Chevys, also explored pivotal historical eras in U.S. history. Sloan has published three books on American cultural history and received a previous OAC award in 2002. Her documentary film, “Suffragettes in the Silent Cinema,” was funded by an Ohio Humanities Council grant.

Price, who joined Miami’s faculty in 1987, previously received OAC grants in 1996 and 2001. Her prints are included in public and private collections, including the Cincinnati Art Museum, Brockton Art Museum, Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Nebraska and the 3M Corporate Art Collection. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Recent exhibitions include “7th Lessedra World Mini-Print Annual” in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 2008; “New Prints/Winter” shown at the International Print Center in Chelsea, N.Y. and Columbia College in Chicago, 2009; and an invitational group exhibition, “Making a Legacy, Living the Legacy” at the Cincinnati Art Museum in 2006.

Goepel’s award supports her non-fiction work, a collection of remembrances of her deceased mother and father, whom she recalls as a walking contrast in ethnicity and culture, as well as the key place of her youth, a Mexican American neighborhood on the West Side of San Antonio, Texas. Goepel received her undergraduate degree at the University of Cincinnati. She taught part time in the English departments of Miami, Xavier, the University of Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky University. She recently completed a tour of duty as acting superintendent of the 20th Fighter Wing Public Affairs Office, Shaw Air Force Base, Sumter, S.C., as a member of the U.S. Air Force Reserve where, among leadership and management duties, she designed and taught five writing workshops.