BALTIMORE, MD.- Baltimore painter and assemblage artist, and New York Studio School alumnus Jim Condron was awarded a generous Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. The Pollock-Krasner Foundation is one of the most prestigious grants offered to established artists today.

Jackson Pollock, the American Abstract Expressionist hero, with a legendary hot temper, died in a car accident while driving drunk with his mistress. His wife, the under recognized world-class painter Lee Krasner, was in Paris at the time. She was heartbroken. She loved him. Together Pollock and Krasner helped put American art on the map. Krasner was largely responsible for the great success of Pollock’s drip paintings. Prior to Pollock’s fame the couple had struggled financially.

Krasner told her friend and adviser, Eugene V. Thaw, "but for Jackson's success, I'd have been hard up most of my life…" The couple lived to make art. Krasner explained, “When his work began to sell a tiny little bit, we lived off that. I was able to keep painting that way so I tried very hard to help him sell.” (Washington Post).

Through Krasner’s influence and connection, Pollock’s career boomed and she’s proven to be just as successful with his legacy, and her own.

After the death of Krasner in 1985, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation was formed to finance established artists such as Jim Condron.

To date, the Pollock Krasner Foundation has awarded over 66 million dollars to artists in 77 countries, from Zimbabwe to Hungary, from Lisbon to Iceland to China. Through the Foundation, the legacy of Krasner and Pollock has a global impact supporting artists around the world.

Condron joins a legacy of over 4100 artists who have put to use a grant awarded by the Pollock Krasner Foundation, including such well-known and accomplished artists as Polly Apfelbaum, Stanley Whitney, Chris Martin, Amy Sillman, Katherine Bradford, Jenny Dubnau, and Joyce Pensato.

The generous grant from the Pollock Krasner Foundation gives Condron time, studio space and materials to make his works which could be described as a 21st century American take on African and Oceanic tribal fetish objects. His pieces express humor, whimsy, absurdity and beauty through the combination and interaction of everyday objects, castoff remnants and paint. Each piece is titled with a textual fragment from a story that intends to add to the work’s rhetoric rather than naming or defining it. Titles are taken from literature by a range of great authors such as Don DeLillo, James Salter, Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol, Oscar Wilde, Hunter Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut, Ernest Hemmingway, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, and others Condron is eager to expand the size and scope of his work and is planning a large-scale piece dedicated to the magnanimous spirit of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner.

Condron has an upcoming solo show (October, 2017) at Loyola University’s Julio Fine Arts Gallery in Baltimore.