Ford Gilbreath Is Winner Of Bowen Award

Ford Gilbreath, a 47-year-old Seattle photographer who in recent years has specialized in night images of the Duwamish Waterway, has won this year's Betty Bowen Memorial Award, one of the most prestigious and financially significant awards made to visual artists in the Pacific Northwest.

The $10,000 award is made annually to an artist from Oregon, Idaho or Washington, who, in the view of the Betty Bowen Committee, is a new, emerging, or not widely recognized artist making outstanding work. The award is named after a well-known patron of the visual arts who died in 1977 after spending much of her life helping artists in the area.

This year the committee, made up of arts patrons, former winners, and long-time friends of Betty Bowen, also took the unusual step of giving a Special Recognition Award of $2,000 to Jennifer Dixon, 40, a Seattle sculptor.

Gilbreath, who works at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer as a photo technician, earned a Master of Arts degree in art and photography at Central Washington University. His most recent show was at the Esther/Claypool Gallery in Seattle, though he also shows at the Blue Sky Gallery in Portland and has been in numerous group exhibitions.

Gilbreath's work on the Duwamish was a several-year project in which he put his camera in a glass fish aquarium and wore hip waders to wade into the river at night and take eerie, nocturnal images at water level. Gilbreath has lived in Seattle since 1978, and past projects have included photographing the downtown from buses and the monorail for a Seattle Arts Commission project, and photographing a downtown Seattle P-patch.He says his latest project involves using a panoramic format pin-hole camera to shoot a dog's eye view of the world.

Dixon earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Washington in 1997. In her latest project, she excavated a vacant, old house in the Central District and displayed what she found as an exploration on memory and mementos.

Seattle artist George Chacona, a former Betty Bowen winner who served on this year's judging committee, said the committee was unanimous in its decision to select Gilbreath. "His work is beautiful," said Chacona. "The committee gave the award to him based more on how they felt about the work than any cerebral intellectualizing."

Chacona said the committee also wanted to recognize the quality of Dixon's work and the fact that she pursued it without regard to financial viability, since her installation work is not the sort that could be sold.

A reception for Gilbreath and Dixon will be held from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Seattle Art Museum, 100 University St., Seattle. The artists will give brief slide talks on their work. The event is free and open to the public.