LocaL                                                                                                                                          2005-12-18

WestConn artist gets national recognition
By Eileen FitzGerald
THE NEWS-TIMES

Artist Marjorie Portnow traveled to California to capture the azure sky and desert for a small oil painting that will have a new home in a national museum.

The assistant art professor at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury won the Henry Ward Ranger Award during an exhibit at the National Academy Museum in New York City.

The award allows for the purchase of the painting from Portnow through an endowment Ranger left to the National Academy of Design in 1915 to build a national collection.

"It's very thrilling and exciting. It's a great honor," Portnow said Tuesday.

Still, she admitted she was more comfortable as a painter than in the public eye.

"You don't think about it (an award) when you're making a painting," she said. "Now, I will go out and do another painting."

Portnow, 63, offered to include three other small paintings, 10 inches by 12 inches, to complete the series she did of the landscape.

"This is a small painting for a larger work," Portnow said. "I am pretty solidly a representational painter and it's pretty much from nature. I'm very old fashioned."

The National Academy, an honorary association of American artists with a museum and a school of fine arts, was founded in 1825 by such artists as Samuel F. B. Morse, and Thomas Cole.

The academicians of the academy are professional artists elected to membership by their peers. The more than 2,000 members include the country's leading painters, sculptors, architects and printmakers like I.M. Pei, Robert Rauschenberg, John Singer Sargent, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

A committee of academy members selected the Ranger award winners.

"This award is certainly an honor. It was intended to help build a national collection when it was established and important purchases are being made," said Marshall Price, assistant curator of the National Academy Museum.

Henry Ward Ranger was a painter who left the academy a large sum of money in 1915, Price said. Ranger left specific instructions that the money be used to purchase works by living artists who were chosen from the academy's annual exhibition.

The artwork is offered to a national museum. When the artist dies, the Smithsonian Institution's American Art Museum can claim the work for its collection or it remains in the institution in which it was placed.

"The academy has placed hundreds of paintings in institutions," Price said. "Each year, a number of paintings are purchased with the money. He wanted to help build a national collection. That's what his legacy was all about."

The academy houses one of the largest public collections of 19th- and 20th-century American art in the country. It comprises more than 5,000 works in almost every artistic style of the past two centuries.

Margaret Grimes, coordinator of the masters of fine arts program at WestConn, called Portnow a great teacher.

"She's brilliantly insightful and tremendously supportive of the students," Grimes said. "She is an inspiration to her undergraduate and graduate students."

Grimes, who won the National Academy's Benjamin Altman Award for landscape painting in 2004, said the awards point to the quality of the school's arts program.

"I am trying to raise the consciousness of people that honors like this are representative of the quality of WestConn's MFA program," Grimes said.

Portnow received a degree in art history from Western Reserve University in Ohio and received training at Pratt Institute and Skohegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She received her master's of fine art at Brooklyn College.

She has works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In addition to the Ranger award, she has received three purchase prizes from the American Institute and the Academy for Arts and Letters and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. She's also received residencies from Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and the McDowell Colony in New Hampshire.

Portnow taught for many years at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and was a visiting professor at WestConn before joining the full-time faculty as assistant professor of art in 2004. She teaches undergraduate and graduate painting.

"There is potential here," Portnow said. "There's something nice about being in a young program."

Contact Eileen FitzGerald at eileenf@newstimes.com or (203) 731-3333.