SEATTLE, WASHINGTON.-Portland artist, Marie Watt has been selected as the recipient of the 2005 Betty Bowen Memorial Award. In addition, two PONCHO Special Recognition Awards in the amount of $1,500 will go to sculptural artist, Evan Blackwell and film artist, David Russo. This year’s winners were selected from among 500 applicants from Washington, Oregon, and Idaho who competed for the $11,000 award.

An award ceremony and reception will be held for this year’s award recipients on Thursday, Oct. 27, from 5:30 – 8 p.m. in the Nordstrom Lecture Hall at the Seattle Art Museum. A brief slide presentation will be given of each winner’s work, followed by a reception in the Simons Boardroom. The ceremony and reception are free to the public. The museum galleries will be open until 9 p.m., and will require standard museum admission.

Marie Watt was born in Washington, but received her MFA in painting and printmaking at Yale University School of Art in 1996. Her recent work explores human stories and rituals implicit in everyday objects. Using blankets as a medium she collects, stacks and stitches the wool together in multi-dimensional ways that evoke memory and markers of life. Both sculptural and tactilely two-dimensional, her work combines the material’s history with indigenous design, oral traditions, and personal experience. Watt currently teaches at Portland Community College.

Evan S. Blackwell currently lives and works in Seattle, Washington, after receiving a B.F.A. in Ceramics from Alfred University, Alfred, New York. Blackwell’s work is distinguished by his fine appropriation of trash and made multiples, built and constructed into delights for the mind. He has worked as a Teaching Assistant at the Haystack Mountain School of Craft and has been an Emerging Artist in Residence at the Pilchuck School of Glass. A love for the expressiveness of materials, the power of multiples and the dynamism of nature inspires his work.

David Russo is an independent film artist based in Seattle, Washington. His films, Populi (2002), and Pan With Us (2003) premiered in back to back years in the Sundance shorts competition, with the latter garnering an “Honorable Mention.” David just finished his latest 35mm film, I Am (Not) van Gogh, for One Reel and the Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, and completed a video workshop of his feature-length script, #2, as an artist-in-residence at 911 Media Arts Center.

Each year, an emerging Northwest artist is recognized by the Betty Bowen Award Committee, in memory of their friend, a dynamic arts enthusiast, and former museum employee, who died in 1977. With the assistance of the Seattle Art Museum, this independent group has been supporting artists in the early stages of their careers in the spirit of Ms. Bowen for nearly 30 years.