John Babcock has been named the 2014 Artist of the Year by the Santa Cruz County Arts Commission. John, an internationally-recognized visual artist whose medium is paper, is the County’s 28th artist to be so honored. Recipients must live in Santa Cruz County and have a national and/or international reputation, as well as having contributed to the cultural enrichment of the local community.
Join us at the Museum of Art and History (MAH) in downtown Santa Cruz on Friday, August 8 at 7:00 PM, where John will speak about his work as a documentation of feeling, emotional responses to an idea, as well as the act of making paper, the building of the medium from cellulose and water. Admission is FREE to the public. Advance tickets are not available. Seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis the night of the event.
An exhibition of John’s work, titled “Poets, Symbols and Songs,” will be on display the MAH in the Forum Gallery from August 1 through October 26, 2014. It will consist of many varieties of artist made paper, exploring the spirituality of mountains and ocean, and symbols of love and despair, seen as a journey of both rhythm and song.
John Babcock has been an artist nearly all his life. At 10 years old, he began his studies at the Memphis Academy of Art. As an adult, he taught high school and college in California, and moved to Santa Cruz in 1975 to finish work on his MFA at the International Institute of Experimental Printmaking. In 1979, he built a large studio in Santa Cruz County and proceeded to make a career in art, building pictures that have been shown around the world. In 1986, he participated in the first Santa Cruz County Open Studio Tour, which he continues to do each year.
In 1976, the curator at The Museum of Modern Art in New York selected one of his paper works for the show, Prints and Unique Works on Paper, a major boost for his career and the field of papermaking as an art form. He exhibited in the first major show of paper in the United States, The Hand Made Paper Object, at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the first major paper show in New York, Papermaking USA, at the American Craft Museum. An international show, Craft Today USA, featured one of his major paper works, Searching New Kingdoms. Presented by the United Information Agency-Arts America and organized by the American Craft Museum, the work was shown in fifteen major museums throughout Europe, from the Louvre in Paris to Moscow to Ankara. Searching New Kingdoms is in the permanent collection of The Museum of Arts and Design in New York.
In 1995, he received a grant from the United State Information Agency (USIA) as a Cultural Specialist to set up a paper making facility at The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, one of the premier art colleges in India. Recently, he has been participating in several international shows. He currently has a piece called Ciphers and Symbols in a group show, Faszination Papier /The Allure of Paper, sponsored by The International Association of Hand Papermakers; it will be traveling to galleries in Germany, Poland and France. This year Victory Song is being shown at the American Embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia in the Art in Embassies program through the U.S. State Department.
The paper show “It’s in the Pulp” at the MAH in 2010 featured six works including the stairway sculpture, “Streamer”. He has had solo shows at the Santa Cruz Art League (Distinguished Artist), the Michaelangelo Gallery in Santa Cruz, and the Cabrillo College Gallery. His work is in major public and corporate collections including the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, the Kalamazoo Institute of Art, the Detroit Institute of Art, the Monterey Conference Center and many hundreds of private collections throughout Europe, the United States, and Japan. He is a long time member of the California Society of Printmakers and The International Association of Hand Papermakers.
He is a member of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, the Santa Cruz Art League and the Pajaro Valley Arts Council. For the Arts Council, he has served as a juror for the “Open Studios Arts Tour” and volunteer for the Hearts for the Arts fundraiser.
The Artist of the Year program is sponsored by the Santa Cruz County Arts Commission and the County of Santa Cruz Department of Parks, Open Space and Cultural Services. For more information about Artist of the Year, please visit www.scparks.com.