The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery has selected the artists whose work will be included in the “Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2009.” Of 3,300 entrants, College of Charleston Studio Art Professor Cliffton Peacock has been named a finalist.
The Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition is a triennial event that invites figurative artists to submit entries in all media to be considered for prizes and display at the National Portrait Gallery. The endowment from the late Virginia Outwin Boochever has enabled the museum to conduct a national portrait competition and exhibition that encourages artists to explore the art of portraiture.
The competition received 3,300 entries in a variety of visual arts media, from digital animation and video to large-scale drawings, prints and photographs and a plethora of painted and sculpted portraits. It was open to artists working in the United States who had created portraits after Jan. 1, 2007, in any visual art form.
The juried exhibition includes 49 finalists’ works (paintings, sculpture, drawings, photographs, and video) that will be on view from Oct. 23, 2009 through Aug. 22, 2010.
Cliffton Peacock received his M.F.A. degree from Boston University in 1977. His teachers there included: James Weeks, John Wilson and Philip Guston. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including three National Endowment for the Arts grants; three Massachusetts Artist Fellowship awards; an Englehard Foundation grant; a Louis Comfort Tiffany Fellowship; and Awards in the Visual Arts grants, sponsored by the Equitable Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the national Endowment for the Arts and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art; the Prix de Rome from the American Academy in Rome; a South Carolina Individual Artist Fellowship; a 2001 fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation; and most recently, a 2007 grant from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, Inc.
Peacock has exhibited his paintings nationally many times since 1980 and has had one-person exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Greenville Museum of Art, Greenville, SC; and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC.
His work is in the collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Hood Museum of Art, among others. He has been a Professor of Fine Arts at he College of Charleston’s School of the Arts since 1996.