News and Events
Noah Simblist wins Moss/Chumley Award
The Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University has announced that Noah Simblist is the winner of the 2006 Moss/Chumley Artist Award. The award, which carries a cash prize of $1,500, is given annually to an outstanding North Texas artist who has exhibited professionally for at least 10 years and who has a proven track record as an active community advocate for the visual arts. Simblist was honored at a private evening at the Meadows Museum.
Simblist was selected for his body of work in painting, some of which also creatively incorporated animation, film and sound components. The jury included Cynthia Mulcahy of the Mulcahy Modern Gallery in Dallas; Amanda Dotseth, Assistant Curator of the Meadows Museum; and Barnaby Fitzgerald, Professor of Drawing and Painting at SMU.
“Noah’s presence has been felt at SMU and in Dallas-area intellectual and artistic circles and contemporary art venues,” said Professor Fitzgerald. “His painting is hauntingly playful, structured on isometric visual rhythms. He utilizes the history of decorative isometric motifs’ ambiguity of space (alternatively inner/outer, cube/ hexagram) as a vehicle for startling revelations of urgent political responsibility. Ancillary to the painting are film and sound components and animation, which serve to emphasize examples of modern violence tied indelibly to social hatred.”
Simblist is an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at the Meadows School of the Arts at SMU, where he has been teaching since the fall of 2003. He has also taught at Hampshire College and at the University of Washington in Seattle. In addition, he has lectured about art historical/theoretical topics at Harvard University, Loyola Marymount University, The University of Urbino in Italy and the Nesiya Institute in Israel. As an artist, his work seeks to question two fundamental poles of painting and drawing practice: identity and the way that it manifests itself within formal investigation. His interests include Jewish iconography and a relationship between image, architecture and text.
Frank Moss and Jim Chumley were Dallas art dealers who made outstanding contributions to the visual arts in North Texas during the 1980s. The pair operated the Nimbus Gallery on Routh Street from 1980 to 1987 and the Moss/Chumley Gallery at the Crescent from 1986 to 1989, where they showcased numerous new artists. The Moss/Chumley Memorial Fund was begun in 1989 by Frank Moss and the Meadows Museum as a tribute to Jim Chumley; Moss’s name was added to the memorial fund upon his death in 1991. Established in 1995, the Moss/Chumley Award is given in their memory. The award is open to artists working in any medium who reside in one of the 11 North Texas counties: Collin, Dallas, Denton, Ellis, Hunt, Johnson, Kaufman, Parker, Rockwall, Tarrant, and Wise. Past recipients have included Catherine Chauvin, Kaleta Doolin, David Dreyer, Susan Kae Grant, David Hickman, Tracy Hicks, Bob Nunn, Sherry Owens, Ludwig Schwarz, Janet Tyson, Marie Van Arsdale, Mary Vernon and Marilyn Waligore.
