9:30 a.m., March 14, 2008--Four artists affiliated with UD have received individual artist fellowships from the Delaware Division of the Arts. Sculptor Robert Bickey, instructor in art, and poet Piotr Florczyk, a part-time instructor in English, each received a $3,000 award in the Emerging Professional category. Nancy Breslin, an alumna and a part-time instructor in photography, and Andrew Wapinski, an alumnus and part-time instructor in painting each received a $6,000 award in the Established Professional category.

The works of 97 applicants were judged by arts professionals from around the country, and 13 individual artists were selected for grants to pursue advanced training, purchase equipment and materials or fulfill other needs to advance their careers. The artists will be honored at a reception March 19 at the Biggs Museum of Art in Dover, and an exhibit of their works will be held in the museum this summer.

Bickey received his BFA in sculpture at the University of Georgia and his MFA degree from Clemson University and joined the UD faculty in 2006.

Before becoming a sculptor, Bickey worked at several jobs from historic renovation, where he learned such skills such as woodworking, welding and casting, to bar tending which, he said, gave him insights into life experiences. He uses a range of “found” materials, including industrial equipment and parts, and incorporates them in his works.

In his sculptures he said he explores issues that arise from a cultural dialectic between puritanical value systems and media-driven images that promise gratification. “People may find some of my work difficult to look at, but my sculptures are intended for viewers to find their own meanings and interpretations,” he said.

A native of Poland, Florczyk is a graduate of University of the Pacific and received a master's degree in creative writing-poetry from San Diego State University.

Florczyk won the Anna Akhmatova (a 20th-century Russian poet) Foundation Fellowship for Younger Translators in 2007 for his translation of the poetry of Julian Kornhauser, an acclaimed Polish poet and critic, which will appear in a book Been and Gone: Poems of Julian Kornhauser, to be published by Marick Press later this year.

His poetry, translations and articles have appeared in several publications, and he served as associate editor of Poetry International in 2005. Florczyk currently is working on an edited collection of essays on Irish poet Ciaran Carson.

Breslin was an academic psychiatrist who decided to pursue a second career as a fine art photographer and completed her MFA degree at UD in 2000. This is the second time she has received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Delaware Division of the Arts.

In much of her recent work she is known for her use of a pinhole camera, which requires longer exposures, resulting in blurred moving images.

Her work has been exhibited in more than 40 group shows, and she also has had several solo and two-artist shows. Her work is currently exhibited in a two-person show at San Antonio College in Texas, and she has an upcoming show featuring pinhole photographs of amusement parks, beginning March 7, at the Mezzanine Gallery in Wilmington.

A graduate of Kutztown University, Wapinski received his master's degree with a concentration in painting from UD. He also participated in a traveling seminar in Italy under a Syracuse University program and served as a visiting lecturer of drawing and painting at Washington College. His paintings have been shown in more than 20 regional exhibitions and in Texas.

Wapinski started as a landscape painter, but his work has become more abstract and currently reflects his interest in water. In an artist's statement he wrote, “I am inspired by water and the way it may be perceived as a romantic symbol of beauty, the universal life-sustaining element and a point of origin for the creation of life...In the context of my work, water metaphorically becomes the basis for primordial chaos...the attainment of form from chaos is achieved through the controlled process of painting.”

Article by Sue Moncure
Photos by Kathy Atkinson and Tyler Jacobson