BALTIMORE, MD.- Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts are proud to announce that Ryan Hackett is the winner of the 2010 Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize. The coveted $25,000 prize was presented at this evening’s awards ceremony at The Baltimore Museum of Art. Works of art by the prizewinner and six other finalists are on view at the BMA until August 1.

“There comes a certain point in your life when it is hard to keep going, but sometimes things happen,” said Hackett. “There are a lot of things that I’d like to do and couldn’t afford. This prize makes them possible.”

Hackett received his Bachelor of Arts in 1999 in studio art from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a Master of Fine Arts from San Francisco Art Institute in 2007. In between his academic pursuits, he co-founded Decatur Blue, a Washington, D.C.-based artist collective that looked to challenge the commercial constructs of the art world by serving simultaneously as curator, artist, and gallery. Hackett's work has been seen in the solo exhibition Interspecies Transmission at G Fine Art in Washington, D.C., in the group show Freaks Of Nature at the Bronx River Art Center in Bronx, NY, and the 2009 Sondheim Prize Artscape Prize Finalists exhibition at The Baltimore Museum of Art.

The Sondheim prize is part of Artscape, America’s largest free celebration of the arts, taking place July 16-18 along Mount Royal Avenue and North Charles Street. It is designed to assist area visual artists in furthering their careers by allowing them to pursue tracks in their work that may not otherwise be possible. The winner was determined by an outside panel of three jurors: Robert Nickas, an independent New York-based curator, writer and art critic; Magdalena Sawon, owner and director of New York’s Postmasters Gallery; and Hamza Walker, director of education and associate curator of the Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago.