Exhibit Dates:  Sept. 6, 2016 - Sept. 22, 2016
Artist Reception:  Thursday, September 15, 2016

About The Exhibit

Sierra Arts is pleased to announce the 2016 Grants to Artists recipients.

Literary: Gailmarie Pahmeier

Performing Art: Erika Paul

Visual Art: Jaime Lynn Shafer & Katie Lewis

Student: Nathaniel Benjamin

A celebration of their accomplishments will be held in the gallery on Thursday Sept. 15, 5-7 p.m. We invite you to come meet the artists and enjoy refreshments generously provided by Wild River Grille.

About The Artist

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Katie Lewis was born in 1977 in Reno, Nevada. She received her BA from Colorado College and her MFA from California College of the Arts. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally at venues such the Museum of Modern Art Luxembourg, Museum Rijswijk – The Netherlands, Stanford University, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco State University, and the Patricia Sweetow Gallery. In 2010 she was awarded a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant. She has also been included the publications The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography and Cartographies of Time both published by Princeton Architectural Press.

01Shafer

Jaime Lynn Shafer is a 2014 Corcoran College of Art + Design MA Art & the Book graduate. A native of Pennsylvania, Shafer graduated from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania in 1999 with a B.F.A. in Fine Arts/Ceramics and a certification in art education. She spent thirteen years teaching art in the Pennsylvania public school system and traveled internationally with her students, offering them an opportunity to experience the global community. Shafer’s work has been exhibited in the US and abroad and is a part of the permanent collections of Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, George Washington University’s Gelman Library, and UCLA Biomedical Library among many others. Shafer is the 2014-2016 recipient of the Nell J. Redfield Fellowship in Book Arts at the University of Nevada, Reno.

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College of San Mateo A.A. and San Jose State University B.A. degrees in general music, classical and jazz theory and jazz performance. Credential coursework and student teaching at San Francisco State University. Music Teachers National Association (MTNA) member first in California (1990) then in Nevada, state and local branches, (NMTA & NNMTA) since 1992. MTNA permanent national certification in private music teaching since 2007. Member of American Federation of Musicians (AFM) since 1988, Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI) artist-publisher and Harry Fox Agency (HFA) publisher since 1994, resident music artist for the Nevada Arts Council and Sierra Arts since 1998, Recording Academy Grammy Foundation member since 2002.

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Gailmarie Pahmeier has been a Nevadan for over 30 years. She teaches creative writing and contemporary literature courses at the University of Nevada, where she has been honored with the Alan Bible Teaching Excellence Award and the University Distinguished Teacher Award. She is also on the faculty of the low residency MFA Program at Sierra Nevada College.

08Benjamin

“Printmaking allows me to spend extended time sitting, contemplating, working the chaotic unconscious into a coherent composition. Through a process of sketching, photographing, drawing, transferring, redrawing, and then carving, the composition evolves into a flowing, expressionistic story. The images are of myself and my loved ones, stripped and placed in abstracted space. They reveal their relationships through body language and the interactions which develop between them and the personas of the psyche. They vibrantly pursue the tipping point between self and other. By representing this search, I interpret the world around me. My hope is that these images illuminate our dependence on one another and revive the mystical aspect of every particle we see.”