Vaune Trachtman Awarded an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant

Congratulations to Vaune Trachtman (2021 AIR) for being named a recipient of the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation’s 2022 Individual Support Grant! The Gottlieb Foundation has been awarding grants to mature, creative visual artists since 1976. These awards are intended to recognize the talents of many individuals around the world who have dedicated long careers to making art and hopes to alleviate some of the financial burden on those artists so they can devote more of their time and energies to their creative endeavors.

Each one of the 20 artists was awarded a cash grant of $25,000 this year. These individuals were selected from a group of 705 applications by a panel of five advisors who are themselves art professionals and who have no affiliation with the Gottlieb Foundation.

Vaune Trachtman, Singlet, 2021. Photopolymer gravure with surface roll on Awagami Shiramine paper, 28 X 34 inches

Vaune Trachtman (b. 1966, Philadelphia, PA) is a printmaker whose work honors historic photographic processes. Formerly a master printer for other artists, she became concerned about the chemicals used to create their images, so in her own work, she pivoted to a nontoxic printmaking process. She now makes gravures with little more than light and water. Her hand-pulled, etched prints conjure associations with early photographic methods, but they are not printed on photosensitive paper, nor do they involve solvents, fixers, or emulsions. Her images explore the evanescence of dreams and memory, resulting in “works that seem more like emanations than photographs” (Mark Feeney, Boston Globe). In 2020 she received a grant from the Vermont Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts to create a new series of gravures called NOW IS ALWAYS. She lives in Brattleboro, Vermont.

“My current series of gravures, NOW IS ALWAYS, was begun during the Great Depression when my father, Joseph Trachtman (1914-1971), shot a few rolls of film near his father's drugstore in Center City, Philadelphia. Nearly 90 years later, my sister found the negatives and gave them to me. Working from my father’s original negatives, I've combined the people from his neighborhood with my own images, many of which were shot from windows and moving vehicles. I want to create a feeling of collapsed-yet-expanded time. I want the viewer to look at the past, and I want the past to look right back.”

Website: www.vaune.net