Corday Announced Recipient of 2019 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Brian Wall Foundation Grant for Sculptors

American Artist Christine Corday Is 2019 Recipient

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NEW YORK, NY, April 15, 2019 – Ronald D. Spencer, Chairman and CEO of The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and Brian Wall, President of the Brian Wall Foundation, today announced that American artist Christine Corday is the 2019 recipient of The Pollock-Krasner Foundation’s Brian Wall Foundation Grant for Sculptors. The annual grant of $25,000, awarded by the Brian Wall Foundation and administered by The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, recognizes an outstanding sculptor who qualifies under the guidelines of artistic merit and financial need.

Christine Corday produces monumental, minimalist sculptures made of metal alloys using primordial forces of extreme heat and pressure. Her background in chemistry and astrophysics is reflected in her focus on elemental metals, which she points out are mined from the earth, but originated in a star before the earth’s formation. Her process often uses heat equivalent to the surface of the sun and thousands of pounds of pressure to form shapes from steel in its liquid state, or densely-compressed iron and metalloid particles.

Christine Corday has said that her sculptures are meant to be touched and walked upon, and are designed to change and rust with human interaction. They can also engender a feeling of impending imbalance in works such as “Geneses,” a 30-foot tall, 8-ton crescent of stainless steel, commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission and installed in 2019 at the city’s Moscone Center.

The Grant for Sculptors will assist Corday in her ongoing investigations of fundamental forces and material states, including collaborations with international scientists. She states, “This grant is coming at a most important moment in the path of the work. Ahead are sculpture projects involving our sun and a miniature momentary star on earth.”

Corday was born in Laurel, Maryland, in 1970, and served as an intern at NASA before receiving her BA in 1992. Following graduate studies at Washington University, she worked in design for advertising agencies until 1999, when she devoted herself full-time to painting while living in Japan and later in Spain. Corday returned to the U.S. in 2005, living in Brooklyn, and began her monumental “Protoist” sculpture series of works hewn from raw steel. In 2010 she was commissioned to apply a black iron-oxide patina to the 15,000-square-foot bronze name parapets of the National September 11 Memorial at the World Trade Center in New York.

Corday has exhibited in public spaces in New York, including an installation under the High Line in 2008, and in solo exhibitions at L.A. County Museum of Art, 2014-15; Projects + Gallery, Saint Louis, 2017-18; and Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, 2019. Group exhibitions include Allan Neederpelt, Greenpoint, N.Y., 2010 and 2011; the Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles, 2016 and 2017; and her work is included in the Lannan Foundation collection. She maintains a studio in Poughkeepsie, New York and her work can be viewed at www.christinecorday.com.

Kerrie Buitrago, Chief Operating Officer of The Pollock-Krasner Foundation stated, “We are excited to continue the collaboration with the Brian Wall Foundation. It provides a wonderful opportunity to extend our reach to outstanding sculptors like Christine Corday, who has woven science and art into a unique creative and intellectual fabric.”

About the Brian Wall Foundation Grant for Sculptors

The Brian Wall Foundation Grant for Sculptors is awarded annually to a sculptor who applies for assistance to the Pollock-Krasner Foundation following their normal application process. Grants are awarded to professional sculptors internationally, based on dual criteria of artistic merit and financial need, whether personal, professional or both. Sculptors interested in applying should visit The Pollock-Krasner Foundation website at www.pkf.org to view and complete an online application.
British-born American sculptor Brian Wall established the Brian Wall Foundation in 2014 to assist artists in need and to further research and scholarship in the field of modern sculpture. “I am grateful for the opportunity to partner with The Pollock- Krasner Foundation, which has excelled at providing assistance to working artists for more than thirty years,” Wall stated. “We are very pleased to award our grant this year to Christine Corday, a talented artist with a cosmic vision.” In 2017 the Grant for Sculptors was awarded to Chinese Canadian sculptor Terence Koh and in 2018 to Argentine sculptor Eugenia Calvo.

For further information about the Brian Wall Foundation, which is based in Oakland, California, the public may visit the website at www.brianwallfoundation.org.

About the Pollock-Krasner Foundation

Based in New York but operating internationally, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation to date has made more than 4500 grants to individual artists in 77 countries, for a total of more than $76 million. Through these grants, the Foundation has enabled artists to create new work, purchase needed materials and pay for studio rent, as well as meet their personal and medical expenses. Recipients of Pollock-Krasner grants have acknowledged their critical impact in allowing concentrated time to work in the studio and prepare for exhibitions and other professional opportunities such as residencies.
To provide additional support, the Foundation maintains an up-to-date and comprehensive Grantee Image Collection representing the work of artists who have received grants since inception. For more information, including guidelines for grant applications, the public may visit the Foundation’s website at www.pkf.org