{"id":55463,"date":"2017-05-25T12:51:25","date_gmt":"2017-05-25T16:51:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/?p=55463"},"modified":"2022-09-12T12:02:21","modified_gmt":"2022-09-12T16:02:21","slug":"three-artists-three-plans","status":"publish","type":"bu-article","link":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/news\/articles\/2017\/three-artists-three-plans\/","title":{"rendered":"Three Artists, Three Plans"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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May 25, 2017<\/div>\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\t
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Kahn career awards give three CFA grads a head start<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
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Flutist Alexandra Conway (CFA\u201909,\u201917) will use her Kahn Award to fund more concerts by her chamber music group, the New England Chamber Players. Photo by Cydney Scott<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Originally published by BU Today
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May 25, 2017 <\/span>By Joel Brown<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

One College of Fine Arts grad will use the award money to expand her chamber music ensemble\u2019s concert schedule in hospitals, schools, and underserved communities, another hopes to build a theater company for young women actors, and the third will support the classic post-diploma artist move to New York.<\/p>\n

In addition to a great deal of gratitude, a certain pragmatism marks the three winners of this year\u2019s Esther B. and Albert S. Kahn Career Entry Awards for graduating CFA artists. Flutist Alexandra Conway (CFA\u201909,\u201917), actor and director Emily Brown (CFA\u201917), and painter Kayla Suverkrubbe (CFA\u201917) will each receive $12,000 to jump-start their career in any way they choose.<\/p>\n

Conway will be able to fund more concerts by the New England Chamber Players<\/a>, an ensemble that provides opportunities for young professional musicians in the Greater Boston area to bring their performances to venues where people might not otherwise hear chamber music, places like libraries, hospitals, retirement centers, and schools.<\/p>\n

\u201cUp until this point we\u2019ve been constricted to places with already established concert series, just for financial reasons,\u201d says Conway, who teaches more than 20 private flute students and works a day job in a local hospital. \u201cWe\u2019re hoping that with this grant we\u2019ll be able to be even more creative with some of the locations we go to.\u201d The money, which she hopes will last for at least two seasons, will pay for hall rentals and advertising and perhaps bump up the players\u2019 modest stipends.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of the advertising budget has come out of my own personal finances in the past, so I\u2019ll be able to not do that anymore,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

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Painter Kayla Suverkrubbe (CFA\u201917) will support her new life as a working artist in New York with her award. Photo by Cydney Scott<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The group\u2019s artistic and executive director, Conway cofounded the New England Chamber Players in 2013 with her friend Thomas Weston (CFA\u201909,\u201912), a clarinetist and the ensemble\u2019s artistic director. Both had noticed many opportunities for freelance performers with orchestras, but few with smaller groups playing the chamber music they love. So they decided to start their own group, hoping to find willing players among the city\u2019s young musicians.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe started not knowing anything about what we were doing, just booking concerts and asking friends to play,\u201d says Conway, a full-time member of the Bangor Symphony Orchestra<\/a> and a part-timer with the Atlantic Symphony Orchestra<\/a> on the South Shore, among others.<\/p>\n

Established in 1985, the Kahn awards are funded by a $1 million endowment from the late Esther Kahn (SED\u201955, Hon.\u201986) and are presented each year to three CFA students in the final semester of their undergraduate or graduate studies. Winners are chosen based on proposals from students detailing how they would use the award to launch their careers, their concern for social issues, and their take on the artist\u2019s role in contemporary society.<\/p>\n

Kahn award recipients are chosen by members of the Kahn family and a changing trio of local arts leaders. On the panel this year were Linda Kahn Green (SED\u201963), daughter of Esther Kahn and the late Albert Kahn (SED\u201959,\u201962), and her husband, Dr. William Green. The arts leaders were Louise Kennedy<\/a>, WBUR senior producer, arts engagement,\u00a0Joanna Fink of the Alpha Gallery<\/a>, and former Boston Globe<\/em> classical music writer Richard Dyer.<\/p>\n

Brown has graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in theater arts, and she\u2019s already on her way to an acting career. In June she will join a yearlong tour with the National Players, an educational theater company and the country\u2019s longest running touring theater company. Its 69th tour will bring Othello<\/em>, Alice in Wonderland<\/em>, and The Great Gatsby<\/em> to cities and towns across America.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat tour is actually going to be an incredible resource for what I want to do with the funds, which is create a company of my own that hones in on facilitating the creativity and the voices of young women aged 8 to 18,\u201d Brown says.<\/p>\n

She plans to focus on comedic work and spoken word poetry, accessibility of the classics, and movement and dance, giving the young people a safe place to be for a couple of hours after school each day. She\u2019s already written a business plan for the company for a theater management class. \u201cI centered that project around Roxbury,\u201d she says, \u201cbut my goal would be to find the community that needs me the most, that needs this program the most, hopefully in the Boston area.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Actor and director Emily Brown (CFA\u201917), in front of a backdrop for a senior production she directed, plans to start a theater troupe with her award as soon as she finishes a yearlong tour. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

She\u2019s hoping to charge low tuition and low ticket prices and aim performances at the community where the company is based. Her ultimate goal is to start conversations between the young people and the adults in their lives.<\/p>\n

Brown started as a summer theater educator when she was 14, in a program at the Summer School for the Performing Arts in Westford, Mass., where she had been a student since she was 8. \u201cThey\u2019re amazing,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m looking to bring the skills I got there elsewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

Suverkrubbe\u2019s graduate thesis work for her MFA in painting earned her a place in a Boston Globe<\/em> feature<\/a> on up-and-coming local arts graduates in late April. Her \u201csquirmy, giant, shaped canvas bubbles off the wall, which makes sense, given the gyrations of the people depicted on it,\u201d the piece reads. \u201cIt\u2019s a comic marvel of sex and gore, with hearts bursting from chests, knobby, tangled limbs, and jutting penises.\u201d Suverkrubbe says Japanese manga is a main influence; the Globe<\/em> references underground comics titan R. Crumb and notes the \u201cPepto-pink\u201d and flaming-red palette.<\/p>\n

Sitting in her paint-splattered but mostly empty studio at 808 Comm Ave., Suverkrubbe explains what she was after with the 40-foot-long set of seven irregularly shaped paintings. \u201cThe thing about the erotic is, you\u2019re expressing the self through the other. It expresses the fears and desires of the individual. But it\u2019s also expressed through this more caricatured other,\u201d she says. \u201cWhen people make an erotic piece of work, they\u2019re kind of projecting what they want, but also a little bit what they\u2019re afraid of, and of course that\u2019s shaped by the wider culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

She\u2019s headed to New York soon, and the award should help keep food on the table until she finds a studio assistant job or some other arts-related gig. The money will also help her set up a studio of her own.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe goal is just to be able to make work and have a decent job that can support my practice,\u201d she says. \u201cThat\u2019s pretty much the goal of most artists, just to do it. The Kahn will certainly help me with that.\u201d<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kahn career awards give three CFA grads a head start Flutist Alexandra Conway (CFA\u201909,\u201917) will use her Kahn Award to fund more concerts by her chamber music group, the New England Chamber Players. Photo by Cydney Scott Originally published by BU Today May 25, 2017 By Joel Brown One College of Fine Arts grad will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2733,"featured_media":55466,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"bu_prepress_billboard":"","_bu_prepress_primary_term":"","_bu_prepress_primary_term_manual":""},"tags":[],"bu-publication":[192],"magazine-article-category":[],"magazine-topic":[],"news-article-category":[309,329],"news-topic":[],"bu_edition":[],"media_type":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/55463"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/bu-article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2733"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55463"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/55463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":92937,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/55463\/revisions\/92937"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55463"},{"taxonomy":"bu-publication","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-publication?post=55463"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-article-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-article-category?post=55463"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-topic?post=55463"},{"taxonomy":"news-article-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-article-category?post=55463"},{"taxonomy":"news-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-topic?post=55463"},{"taxonomy":"bu_edition","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu_edition?post=55463"},{"taxonomy":"media_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media_type?post=55463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}