The Sondheim Prize: Raising the Stakes

The Trawick Prize better watch out. There's an upstart contemporary art award in town, and it stands to give the Bethesda-born competition -- which has been handing out $14,000 in prize money to artists from Maryland, Virginia and Washington since 2003 -- a run for its money.

Okay, so maybe the Baltimore-based Janet and Walter Sondheim Prize isn't exactly "in town." Now in its second year, the art contest, named for the late Baltimore public servant and civic leader and his late wife, is open to visual artists working in the Baltimore region. (This year that includes two D.C. artists.) Examples of work by the 2007 finalists are on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art. The winner of the Sondheim Prize's $25,000 purse, which unlike the Trawick does not get divided among first-, second- and third-place finishers, will be announced Friday at the museum.

There's another critical difference between the contests, beyond the disparity in the cash value of the prizes. It doesn't have to do with the caliber of the entrants either. (Baltimore sculptor Richard Cleaver, whose painted and bejeweled ceramic-and-wood figures are part of the BMA show of Sondheim finalists, took home the Trawick's $10,000 first prize in 2003. So there's a lot of cross-fertilization of the talent pools, which is good.) Rather, the edge that this year's Sondheim Prize exhibition has over any version of the Trawick competition I've ever seen is in the choice of venue. The art just looks better in the BMA's spacious galleries than anything ever will at the Creative Partners Gallery, the cramped storefront on the ground floor of a downtown Bethesda office building that has been the Trawick's unfortunate exhibition space of choice since its inception.

It's hard to imagine a more handsome presentation of the work of the seven Sondheim finalists: Cleaver, Frank Hallam Day, Eric Dyer, Geoff Grace, Gabriel "Baby" Martinez, Tony Shore and Karen Yasinsky.

Now far be it from me to second-guess the jurors -- Derrick Adams, a New York-based artist; Becky Smith, owner and director of Bellwether Gallery in New York; and Robert Storr, commissioner of the 2007 Venice Biennale and curator and dean of the Yale University School of Art -- but I'm going to go ahead and pick a winner. For my money, which -- remember, kids -- is worth a big fat nothin', the most intriguing stuff is Martinez's.

Part performance artist, part sculptor, part conceptualist and part photographer, Martinez produces art reminiscent of Gabriel Orozco, but with his own distinctive voice. Martinez's works at the BMA include things you may have seen before, such as a series of photographs documenting scrap-lumber benches the artist built and installed in bench-less bus shelters (part of a recent survey of contemporary D.C. Latino art at the Cultural Institute of Mexico). Yet other works reveal the true richness of Martinez's brand of artmaking, which is not just heady, but playful and subversively generous: Two photos document an "action" in which Martinez purchased an hour of labor from a business owner and then donated it to an employee in the form of a siesta; another shows a pair of thrift-store pants into whose pocket the artist slipped a $20 bill -- part of the proceeds of an art-show stipend -- in effect rewarding people who share his taste in clothes, if not art.

Other highlights of the Sondheim show include Yasinsky's "La Nuit" and "Jules and Juliette." Evocative of the Brothers Quay's disturbingly dreamlike aesthetic, the two short animations (one drawn and the other stop-action) share a sense of imperfectly realized desire and thwarted expectation with the artist's suite of 15 drawings, "Curious, She Stands Alone." A member of the film/media studies faculty at Johns Hopkins University, Yasinsky makes work that will, I suspect, be a revelation -- and a most welcome one at that -- to a lot of visitors who make the trip from Washington, if not those from her home town as well.

THE JANET AND WALTER SONDHEIM PRIZE FINALISTS: ARTSCAPE AT THE BMA Through Aug. 5. Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Dr. (at North Charles and 31st streets), Baltimore. 443-573-1700. http://www.artbma.org. Open Wednesday-Friday from 11 to 5, Saturdays and Sundays from 11 to 6. Free.