OTTERBEIN ART LECTURER RECEIVES 2008 GUGGENHEIM FELLOWSHIP

OTTERBEIN ART LECTURER RECEIVES 2008 GUGGENHEIM FELLOWSHIP

Abandoned Apartment, Stauffenbergallee, Dresden, Germany, 2006. ©Fredrik Marsh 2006.

Photographer Fredrik Marsh, a senior lecturer at Otterbein College and board member of the Greater Columbus Arts Council (GCAC), is the recipient of a 2008 fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Marsh is the first Guggenheim Fellow in the history of Otterbein College.

Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of stellar achievement and exceptional promise for continued accomplishment. Only seven fellowships were granted nationwide in the photography category for 2008.

Marsh is beginning his 17th year at Otterbein. "My time at Otterbein has allowed me to flourish both as a teacher and working artist and I continue to enjoy being a part of the college community. Bringing Joel Meyerowitz to campus for the Signature Series is one of the highlights of my years here," he said, referring to the lecture and exhibition at Otterbein by the award-winning photographer and his exhibition of photographs of Ground Zero in the days and weeks following Sept. 11, 2001.

"The project I proposed as part of my Guggenheim application will take me to the mainland China city of Guangzhou in Guangdong Province," Marsh said. "I traveled to this part of the world in December 2006 to attend the Lianzhou International Photography Festival as an invited guest for a public lecture in the Cultural Square and a solo exhibition of my color work from Dresden, Germany." The city of Guangzhou is a large metropolitan city of nine million inhabitants, with nine million more who come to work in the city each day.

"My project is Vanishing Voices, Disappearing Neighborhoods: The Price of Modernization in China, and will involve photographing older neighborhoods of Guangzhou in the wake of their inevitable imminent destruction as the Chinese government continues their massive modernization through ‘Smash the old; Build the new,' despite the loss of culture and displacement of entire neighborhood populations," Marsh said. "I also plan on creating some audio and video work as part of a larger art piece. Likely, some oral history will take place."

Marsh is a winner of five Individual Artist Fellowships, three from the Ohio Arts Council and two from GCAC. He was a 2002 participant in the GCAC Dresden/Saxony Residency in Dresden, Germany. You can view his work and learn more about him online at www.fredrikmarsh.com. He resides in Columbus (43214), with his partner Ardine Nelson, also a Guggenheim Fellow in the photography category this year. The couple is the first in Guggenheim history to both receive fellowships in the same year.

Since its establishment in 1925 the Guggenheim Foundation has granted more than $265 million in fellowships to almost 16,500 individuals. Former fellows include Ansel Adams, Aaron Copland, Langston Hughes, Henry Kissinger, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Wendy Wasserstein, Derek Walcott and Eudora Welty.