2013 Pollak Prizes for Excellence in the Arts

We honor the legacy of Theresa Pollak (1899-2002), one of Virginia's best-known artists and art educators, in part because she helped make Richmond a cultural center. She founded both what became the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts and the University of Richmond arts program. Take that in for a second. Think about a little Jewish woman in this city in the 1920s and '30s who possessed the energy and persuasive power to project the need for these institutions into reality. Her perseverance, coupled with an appreciation of art by Henry H. Hibbs Jr. (1887-1977), then head of Richmond Professional Institute (VCU's predecessor), set in motion a series of events whose incalculable impact forever altered the city and region. The Pollak recipients are chosen by selectors through reader nominations. Some of this year's honorees who aren't from Richmond wound up here almost by accident. For one, her car broke down. Another's sweetheart led him here. Some intended to leave, but kept getting work, and the cost of living was low. They may have traveled for years in distant cities, but returned because Richmond is as much a home to them as perhaps they've ever had. They may remain here for a lifetime of creation. Now, that's worth some recognition. —HK The selectors: Todd Herrington, member of musical groups honored in 2007 and 2013; Jason Keith, 2013 Emerging Artist honoree; Matt Lively, 2013 Visual Art honoree; Jason Marks, 2013 Theater honoree; Lea Marshall, dancer and critic, member of groups honored in 1998 and 2009; Patrick Gregory, 2013 Film honoree; Jerry Williams, longtime cultural observer, of TVJerry and Sifter websites; and Susan Worsham, 2013 Photography honoree.

16th Annual Pollak Prize Winners

Andras Bality • Cheryl Pallant • Tom Chenoweth • Regula Franz • Rick Alverson •

1708 Gallery's InLight • Maggie Ingram • Arnott Mader • Debra Clinton

VISUAL ART

Open-Air Painter: Andras Bality The selectors said: "Bality's light-filled paintings exhibit a comprehensive knowledge of abstraction and design while continuing the rigorous tradition of painting from life. Many of his paintings capture everyday scenes from the Richmond area, including the James River." Life and art might well have followed a very different path for Andras Bality, who developed his passion for expression through paint at an early age. "You know, I was always painting and drawing — when I was 10, I had a little shed in the backyard where I would go out and paint," Bality says. "I would copy the covers of Little House on the Prairie and Misty of Chincoteague books — I was copying the masters." A family friend down the street, a painter of duck blinds and decoys, noticed Bality's natural ability and took him under his wing. "He would give me paint and paintbrushes," Bality says, recalling an art education that seemed fast-tracked for craft fairs and flea markets. He was "learning how to paint these sort of Thomas Kinkade landscapes with ducks." At Virginia Commonwealth University, Bality was still merrily painting happy clouds when he received a backhanded compliment from a professor that kick-started a drive to do more. "I don't remember which teacher it was; I was doing a Thomas Kinkade landscape and he said, ‘Ooh, how did you learn to paint like that?' It wasn't meant as a compliment. I took it as one — it took a few years to figure [that] out." At last Bality, with his already well-developed sense of landscapes, colors and space, discovered his artistic groove: en plein air. This favored method of the mid-19th-century artists of the Barbizon and Impressionist schools — a reverence for natural light, the careful study of color and the ability to build narratives by combining open spaces with moments of transition — overwhelmingly spoke to Bality. It was a discovery that allowed him to re-channel that lifelong love for the art that first inspired his 10-year-old self. "I love the colors, I love the space — it took me a while to realize you can paint anything you want, as long as you make it your own," he says. "I couldn't really reproduce the cover of Misty of Chincoteague — I had to make it mine. You have to trust your instincts about what to be making art about." Looking back, Bality has a lurking sense that he might have been perfectly content had his world remained devoted to endlessly recapturing the sublime pastel banality of that dog-eared cover of Misty. But for an artist, fulfillment often is the opposite of contentedness. "I definitely feel I made the right career choice," he says. "I feel like I'm barely making headway, but I keep trying." And he appreciates his ongoing close relationship with that neighbor, Norman Williams, who first fostered Bality's love for light and the infinite wash of the tinctured world. "We still talk color theory." —CD

16th Annual Pollak Prize Winners

Andras Bality • Cheryl Pallant • Tom Chenoweth • Regula Franz • Rick Alverson

1708 Gallery's InLight • Maggie Ingram • Arnott Mader • Debra Clinton

Words

Movement in Writing: Cheryl Pallant The selectors said: "Author, poet and dancer Cheryl Pallant weaves her three forms together seamlessly in her work, which includes publishing nine books and more than 200 reviews and interviews with dancers, performance artists and others. Her work scintillates through Richmond's cultural fabric." Words are not ideas — they help express ideas. Remove the rules, and ideas soar. Remove the rules, and words dance. Cheryl Pallant's poetry draws power from words freed to break, bend and redefine the rules. "There's a lot of wordplay for sure, but from having studied Buddhism for years and from structuralism in college … I've developed a facileness with words," says the New York City native, describing her poetry- writing style as "agile" and "unpredictable" — like the contact-improvisation dancing that is her other passion. "Words are very pliant, and I tend to make many associative leaps." Her study of Buddhism — and some life experiences that required Buddha-like patience — helped define Pallant. Diagnosed as a young girl with scoliosis, a curvature of the spine, she was encouraged by her doctor to cease all physical activity. The supposed cure becalmed her, but stillness and superhuman posture became her new athleticism.

Read Cheryl Pallant's poetry

She also developed another sort of muscularity to compensate for what looked like the end of childhood play. Writing became her swingset; words became movement. While attending college — after an adolescence spent in constant pain caused by her spinal curvature — she finally decided to try movement again, enrolling in a modern dance class. It set her free. It also made her a polyglot. As she became fluent in dance, she learned to invent new ways of expressing her thoughts on the page. "I would say … they're both languages," says Pallant, who teaches at the University of Richmond. "Poetry makes me aware of the power of image and the power of articulation in words. And then in dance, there's articulation in motion. They both work with breath. They both work with rhythm." As master of both languages, she blended them, making something wholly new. Words and dance, meter and motion, inertia and action became Pallant's new voice. Now with more than a half-dozen books of poetry or collaborative poetry behind her, as well as one book about contact-improvisation dance, Pallant has evolved even as a polyglot: "I guess I'm polylinear." That is, she says, her writing expresses far more by defying the gravity that most grammarians use to restrict meaning. Like Buddhism, she believes, reality should be viewed not simply as it appears to us, but as it is. "Language — we're not aware that even in our speaking, it is a construct," Pallant says. "But when it comes down to getting into what's real, there's a kind of evaporating or imploding — you start seeing that everything is connected to everything." Her readers should feel her poetry, she says. "I talk often about wanting to awaken a body. I don't mean just thinking. I want to get you aware of your body or your existence in ways that you were not previously aware. Sometimes, making things strange [is] the only way to wake you up and get you out of a habit. In this case, it's a habit of reading." —CD

16th Annual Pollak Prize Winners

Andras Bality • Cheryl Pallant • Tom Chenoweth • Regula Franz • Rick Alverson

1708 Gallery's InLight • Maggie Ingram • Arnott Mader • Debra Clinton

Applied Arts

Giving shape to ideas: Tom Chenoweth The selectors said: "Tom Chenoweth crafts hard metal into sculptures for art's sake and for everyday use. From the fluid elegance of nature to bold industrial statements, his work has graced Richmond homes, gardens and public spaces for more than 35 years." As with so many great artists, brilliance began with The Teacher. For Tom Chenoweth, that teacher was Karol Thompson, who taught art at Suitland High School in Prince George's County, Md. "She's only 12 years older than me, which is why I thought she was ancient," says Chenoweth, who has remained friends with Thompson over the years. "She influenced several generations of folks to go on to art school or some kind of career in a creative area." Because of Thompson, he enrolled in the Maryland Institute College of Art, he says, adding, "She's the reason both my sisters came down [to Virginia Commonwealth University] and went through the arts programs." Today Chenoweth, who had an early affinity — but no aptitude — for science, is among Richmond's best-known and celebrated sculptors. "Everyone has ‘The Teacher' — capital T's," he says. "Well, maybe not everybody has The Teacher. I was lucky that I had The Teacher." And Richmond is lucky to have Chenoweth, who's also been known to work collaboratively in brick and mortar, which he did as a co-founder of Richmond's venerable 1708 Gallery as well as with Astra Design, the studio he's operated with his wife, Louise Ellis, since the early 1990s. "It's funny, I moved to Richmond right about now, 40 years ago," says the Washington-area native, who arrived "sort of at loose ends" after the Baltimore autobody-shop-cum-artist's-flop he'd shared with some printmaker friends was sold to new owners. VCU's graduate school provided an excuse to move south, he says, though he never expected to settle. "I tried to leave twice, but something always came up and I stayed. Now I have very deep roots." Among those roots is 1708 Gallery. "There was a show at [the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts] that had an objectionable piece to some people's eye; they censored it, and a bunch of us got, oh, upset about it," says Chenoweth, one of 20 or so artists — mostly VCU alumni — who launched the gallery in September 1978. "So we started our own space, where we wouldn't censor. We started it on a shoestring and here it is — what, 35 years later — and it's still going. It's sort of surprising." Less surprising is the staying power of Chenoweth's art, both in form and appeal. His sturdy works in metal often mimic the climbing towers and edifices of the man-made landscape, sometimes blending with natural elements "like trees and things like insects and birds." His inspirations remain rooted in his early love of the sciences. "I would have been a scientist if I'd been better at math — I don't have a mind for it," Chenoweth says, without regret. "I've been lucky that I've gotten to, well, not [to] do what I want all the time or even most of the time. But I've gotten to make some things that popped into my head, which is satisfying." —CD

16th Annual Pollak Prize Winners

Andras Bality • Cheryl Pallant • Tom Chenoweth • Regula Franz • Rick Alverson

1708 Gallery's InLight • Maggie Ingram • Arnott Mader • Debra Clinton

Photography

World Citizen: Regula Franz The selectors said: "In a time when pictures of the greater world fly past us through every conceivable means, the power of a single static image can lose its pungency. Not in the work of Regula Franz. Her splendid depictions of far-away places offer a glimpse into the souls of the people and the history they share with each other, and through her, with us. Regula Franz went to the Indonesian island of Sulawesi in 1998 to be among the Toraja tribe, experience their elaborate burial rites and explore tombs carved into cliffs. "I had to get into this cave to get the picture," she says of a remarkable photograph. It shows a sarcophagus, a skull on one side, a plant on the other — the symbols of life, death and the transitory nature of things amid the eternal stone. She laughs, "But I have no recollection of taking it." She's traveled widely, and along the way she built a massive body of photographic work. She grew up in the cultural and educational center of Basel, Switzerland. Her father, Werner Franz, a certified public accountant, was one of her most avid supporters until his 2010 death. "He recognized my spark and loved that I traveled," she says. As a teenager, Franz used a 1972 Olympus OM-1 single lens reflex camera to capture scenes from her trips, but she never considered the pictures anything beyond documentation. In her 20s, she traveled with friend, mentor and photographer Dieter Hofer. "We did photo stories," she says. "We took crazy trips through the American West, Mexico and Latin America." She then studied American and English literature and linguistics at the University of Basel, anticipating a career as a professor. Her artist's life started in 1985 after she received an exchange-student position in the University of Virginia's English graduate department.  There, she took elective classes including darkroom photography with Holly Wright. She was immediately hooked. "I loved to do something where the image comes up and out of this solution and something is actually created," Franz says. She aced the course with pictures of the Virginia State Fair, and Wright advised her to enter the Virginia Commonwealth University graduate photography program, then chaired by George Nan. "I owe George Nan everything," Franz says. "He took me in and saw my potential." She photographed Richmond's street festivals; she waitressed at Millie's Diner and enjoyed a bohemian life. During the winter, Franz tromped around Mexico, documenting rituals. "I think photography is experiential," she says. "I take my camera and put myself in situations and see what happens." While photographing a 1993 Day of the Dead ceremony on the Yucatán Peninsula, she met vacationing German architect Lothar Pausewang, whom she eventually married. They began a journey that started in Germany, where Franz joined the Berlin newspaper Die Tageszeitung ("Taz"). She recalls, "I was in the middle of a country coming together again [after the fall of the Berlin Wall], and it was amazing." They took long sojourns into Asia. "We trekked through Nepal. And then to Myanmar and Laos. We took every means of transport you've seen in your life." After six years away, the two returned to Richmond. Franz worked as the assistant to the executive director at the Hand Workshop/Visual Arts Center. Through VisArts, she became connected to the Anderson Ranch Art Center of Colorado, where she was awarded several residencies. At 8,000 feet above sea level, she tackled the 40,000 images she'd taken during her exploits. "I wanted to show these very quiet moments in these loud countries," Franz says. "I wanted to find these moments that were pivotal to individuals, but something universal that I felt." The upshot was a 2006 exhibit, "Sacred Encounters," at the Richmond gallery Corporate and Museum Frame. Her next body of work, "In the Dreamtime," consisted of large-format images from Costa Rica and Bolivia. Extended visits to Switzerland have spurred Franz to compile images of aspects significant to her European upbringing. "It's time to assess and think about the painful process of being in your home country but not belonging there anymore," she says. "My life is not in Switzerland. I'm a gypsy. No place is really home." —HK

16th Annual Pollak Prize Winners

Andras Bality • Cheryl Pallant • Tom Chenoweth • Regula Franz • Rick Alverson

1708 Gallery's InLight • Maggie Ingram • Arnott Mader • Debra Clinton

Film

Between the Silences: Rick Alverson The selectors said: "A director who uses an organic approach to filmmaking, Rick Alverson allows for a certain flexibility in the narrative instead of following the direct line of the script. This results in an experience that takes viewers outside their expectations. In 2011, he was awarded a Visual Arts Fellowship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts." For Rick Alverson, the contemporary climate of media saturation and easy access changes the responsibility of filmmaking. "It just isn't enough to put out a film," he says. "If there isn't something unique about your approach to the form, it's like littering." Alverson, a writer-director-musician, had worked with the Bloomington, Ind.-based recording label Jagjaguwar on nine albums in almost as many years as vocalist for the bands Drunk and Spokane when in 2010, the label backed his move into filmmaking. His films, like the music, can be described, as commentator Martin Williams wrote of Spokane's oeuvre,  "the melancholic splendour and barely perceptible progression of a sinking sun." Alverson's debut, The Builder, took a subject portrayed by any number of films — an immigrant disillusioned with the promise of a better life in the United States — with the method of an existential study. He followed it with New Jerusalem, about an immigrant who is also a fractured war veteran coming to terms with a co-worker's religious zeal. Perhaps expecting something more conventional, some audience members walked out during the Sundance screening of The Comedy, an unflinching portrayal of those who feel a certain entitlement, set in the hipster epicenter of New York City's Brooklyn borough. Originally from Spokane, Wash., Alverson came to Richmond more than 20 years ago after living in upstate New York and New York City. During the early 1990s, he attended film school at NYU, but he dropped out, then fronted rock bands for a decade. Still, the idea of making movies percolated. A catalyst may have been Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 fable/psychological thriller Stalker, which he saw in New York. "That film was confusing to me unlike anything I'd ever seen, and I was ultimately tremendously moved by it," he says. "I felt altered. The passage of the camera and tracking shots and narrative are so slow, so dysfunctional, it actually becomes an active internal experience." He was also influenced by Lars von Trier's controversial 1998 film The Idiots. In Alverson's view, these films, as well as screen adaptations of The Exorcist and Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, challenge the expectation of movies as a means of comfort and distraction. They liberated him to make art that examines the unease inherent in our relationships with the world. Alverson casts mostly nonprofessional actors, friends, musicians and writers, because he's more interested in personalities. Writer/performer Colm O'Leary carried The Builder and was featured in New Jerusalem. Richmond artist/musician Liza Kate appeared in The Comedy along with Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim.  Bandmate and partner Courtney Bowles co-produced The Builder and New Jerusalem. Robert Donne, Alverson's writing partner in The Comedy, also scored the film. His roster is currently full of projects in development. Planned for a future shoot in central Virginia is Clement, based on a novel by O'Leary. "Centrally it deals with the early, proto [Ku Klux] Klan in the South," he says. "This is the genesis of contemporary race relations in the cauldron of Reconstruction. And people are strangely afraid, in my opinion, to invest in something like that." The Couple is more in the psychological-thriller realm, about a woman whose behavior is dictated by that of her dog. This winter he'll likely begin production of Entertainment, set in the Mojave Desert. It follows a broken-down comedian (Gregg Turkington) playing clubs across the Southwest, working his way to Los Angeles to meet his estranged daughter. "Hopefully," says Alverson, "it'll be brutally depressing." —HK

16th Annual Pollak Prize Winners

Andras Bality • Cheryl Pallant • Tom Chenoweth • Regula Franz • Rick Alverson

1708 Gallery's InLight • Maggie Ingram • Arnott Mader • Debra Clinton

Arts Innovator

Illuminating Art: 1708 Gallery's InLigh t The selectors said: "Ten months to plan, over in five hours. For one luminous evening, art escapes from the galleries and spills onto the streets as sculptures, performances and projections — with light as the medium — transforming streets, sidewalks, waterways and public spaces into something amazing, beautiful, provocative and memorable for all of Richmond." InLight was one of those "You can't do that in Richmond" undertakings that got done in Richmond. This year marks the sixth annual excursion into light, sound and imagery that is appropriately dreamlike for its presentation at night. The 1708 Gallery, a nonprofit, artist-run space for new work, started in Shockoe Bottom in 1978 as a place where artists could exhibit free of the restrictions imposed by other institutions. Through successive moves, it has put itself at the vanguard of the block-by-block rehabilitation of Richmond's downtown. Six years ago, 1708 came to the crest of its 30th anniversary. Members discussed an appropriate event to mark this milestone — one that made a lasting impression. "It came out of the idea of a ‘Nuit Blanche,'" recalls 1708 director Emily Smith. The "white night," a regular fixture in Paris and elsewhere, is a time when light and spectacle fill the streets. The core group that devised Richmond's first such event included artists and community board members: Allison Andrews, Kathryn Henry-Choisser, Suzanne Hall, Maureen Neal, Lucy Meade and Amie Oliver. Tatjana Beylotte, then the executive director of 1708, joined the staff for planning. "We had monster, mammoth meetings," says Smith, who at the time was commuting from Charlottesville to her curatorial job at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The premise remains as it started: inviting artists to submit light-based works that respond to the part of the city where InLight is held. The first InLight, on Sept. 5, 2008, along Broad Street, seemed headed for a washout. A torrential downpour delayed the march of participants in the Wearable Art competition, but then suddenly stopped. No BS! Brass played and the rest of the night went well, if somewhat soggily. Among the notable pieces from that night was Light House_1: Jackson Ward, assembled by architect/artist Peter Culley and his team in the lot next to the Visual Art Studio. Culley re-created a town house that seemed stuck in time — a ghostly after-image. The piece swept the awards and set the bar high. Soon after the successful first outing, the planning group decided that it would make InLight an annual event and invite a respected outside curator to select the exhibitions, keeping in mind the context of the site. Recurring features include a parade of hand-made lanterns and the "People's Choice" vote. After six years, word of InLight has spread to artists throughout the world. Smith says, "It's really validating and heartening to know that a certain kind of artist is attracted to this event, because it is in some measure pretty crazy how you install your work over a six- or eight-hour period. It's on view, and then you take it apart. There's magic in the adrenaline and pace of it." This year's InLight takes place Nov. 8. —HK

16th Annual Pollak Prize Winners

Andras Bality • Cheryl Pallant • Tom Chenoweth • Regula Franz • Rick Alverson

1708 Gallery's InLight • Maggie Ingram • Arnott Mader • Debra Clinton

Music

Messenger of Hope: Maggie Ingram The selectors said: "Although her live CD won an Independent Music Award for contemporary gospel this year, singing might not be the most impressive thing about this evangelist with an honorary doctorate in music. Maybe it's that she drove around town dispensing free food to the needy or hauling visitors to prison on Family Day, a program she helped establish. Maybe it's that she turned her home into a halfway house for women newly released from prison. Regardless, those who have witnessed the love in her voice will never forget Maggie Ingram." Maggie Ingram's life has been full of privation and opportunity. Through it all, she's been determined to let God's hand steer her. Now 83, Ingram began life poor, as a Georgia sharecropper's daughter. She found love early, married at 16, and had five children. A few years later, she suffered the sorrow and shock of her husband's sudden departure. "Daddy, he moved the family to Miami," says Almeta Ingram-Miller, who serves as her mother's spokeswoman and one of Ingram's backup singers, the Ingramettes. She was little more than a toddler when her father left. "It just got to be too much for him. He literally packed up — she came home from work, and he was gone. She was in her 20s with five kids. It was a real shock to Mama that he would leave us down there in Miami." At first, Ingram sought aid from family. "The sad part about this was …  she got some suggestions on how to split the family up rather than keep it together." So Ingram prayed for guidance. "This is how our singing group was really birthed," Ingram-Miller says. "It was Mom's prayer that God would help her keep her family together. God told her what you have is more important than anything you don't have. The answer was, you need to work with what you have." And she listened. "Every day when we got home from school, she would sit us in a circle on the floor and she would sit with a stick, beating time," her daughter says. "She had us sitting around learning to sing … parts on songs that she was writing. She was amazing." Others thought so, too. When the family sang outside the home, it didn't take long for offers of fame and glory to come her way. The first, appropriately, came in church. After Ingram moved the family to Richmond in 1961, "Gospel Joe" Williams, part of the seminal Virginia group The Harmonizing Four, heard them during a service at Hood Temple AME Zion Church in Jackson Ward. Williams recruited them to sing at the group's annual anniversary extravaganza at what is now the Landmark Theater. "This lady and her five kids, we walked on stage and the rest was history," says Ingram-Miller. Over the years, other offers came. James Brown asked Ingram to tour with him. During a rare performance in Los Angeles, Richard Pryor's manager tried to sign her. Ingram turned them both down flat. "For her, the message has always been more important than the music," says Ingram-Miller. "She's always been a person who's written first of all out of the experience of her life. No matter how tough things are, there is a God who sees you and who is concerned about your situation and not only sees you but is willing to do something about it. Her music is redemptive and uplifting." Rather than tour with Brown, Ingram performed in prisons and churches, seeking first to spread God's word — something she continues to do. "Your job is to pass God's message of hope on to somebody else," Ingram-Miller says of her mother's commitment. "That's why you've been given a chance." —CD

16th Annual Pollak Prize Winners

Andras Bality • Cheryl Pallant • Tom Chenoweth • Regula Franz • Rick Alverson

1708 Gallery's InLight • Maggie Ingram • Arnott Mader • Debra Clinton

Dance

A Wealth of Experience: Arnott Mader The selectors said: "Through his intelligent and demanding instruction, Arnott Mader, a living treasure of ballet history (former dancer for the Royal Ballet and American Ballet Theatre and longtime teacher at Richmond Ballet and VCU Dance), has shaped the technique and careers of generations of Richmond dancers." Arnott Mader's lifetime of dance got its unlikely start in the countryside near the tiny Canadian hamlet of Breslau, Ontario. "I was a farmer," says Mader, now an emeritus instructor after 31 years with the Richmond Ballet. "I took my music lessons on Saturdays, when we went to sell our eggs and chickens at the market." Young Mader had never even heard of ballet when, in high school, he sat awestruck by a girl who danced en pointe for a student assembly. The dancer, just a bit older then he, had recently returned from studying in Chicago. "I'd never seen it before," he says. "I can still see her in my head. For some reason when I saw her, in my head I was saying, ‘She's doing ballet,' only I was pronouncing it ‘bah-lette.' It was very beautiful to me. It was moving to the music the way she did then that made it very wonderful for me." Mader's music teacher took note, asking him to play piano for dance classes. By the next summer, Mader came around the other side of the piano, enrolling in a tap class taught by the same girl he'd seen dancing at the school assembly. Thus, a promising farming career ended. Mader next attended the Royal Academy of Dance in Toronto. In 1949, when the Royal Ballet of London toured North America, one of his dance instructors arranged for an audition that led to a scholarship in London. He's never considered himself exceptional. "I would probably never get a job these days, because the technique has gotten so much better," says Mader, attributing his career to often being "at the right place at the right time." But a farm in Ontario, even at a stretch, seems an unlikely "right place," and suggests those early breaks had little to do with luck. "I've never served coffee to anyone — I've always danced," Mader acknowledges. He toured North America four times with the Royal Ballet, and danced as part of the house production company of Radio City Music Hall, performing in big numbers that used to precede films there. He worked under Hanya Holm, one of the iconic founders of American modern dance, and performed in the original Carol Channing production of Hello, Dolly! As part of a later USO tour of the show, he entertained troops in Vietnam. "It was the most amazing — most amazing — experience," he says of performing for 50,000 GIs in a massive bomb crater-turned-amphitheater near the Cambodian border. "The generator went out — there was no light on us," he remembers. "All of a sudden, 50,000 flashlights lit the stage. It was just when we started singing ‘Hello, Dolly!' All of us were crying." After a lifetime of spectacular stage leaps, Mader remains grounded, equally proud of his decades spent inspiring new dancers. "You know, I really don't know," he says. "People, they give me an honor here or there, but I don't know. I just teach." —CD

16th Annual Pollak Prize Winners

Andras Bality • Cheryl Pallant • Tom Chenoweth • Regula Franz • Rick Alverson

1708 Gallery's InLight  • Maggie Ingram • Arnott Mader • Debra Clinton

Theater

A Brilliant Career: Debra Clinton The selectors said: "Through her 22-year association with the School of  the Performing Arts for the Richmond Community (SPARC), Debra Clinton has dedicated much of her life to nurturing young talent, and she works diligently to educate and motivate people of all ages with her passion for the arts." Debra Clinton bought a $200 car from her uncle in 1987 to take her from New York to Los Angeles in pursuit of an acting career. When the car broke down near Fredericksburg, she decided to stay in Virginia, settling in Richmond. She had tried for six years to eke out a living pursuing theater opportunities across the country while working as a waitress. She'd earned her Actors' Equity Card while performing in New York, in a children's theater show. The time for a change of venue seemed right. Manhattan-born and Long Island-raised with Richmond roots, Clinton inherited some of her theatrical inclinations. Her maternal grandmother, Yetta Goldstein, "a big personality and an opera singer," inspired much of her love of musical theater. After New York, Richmond seemed almost dreamlike. The Boulevard was the most beautiful street she'd ever seen. "I got very involved quickly because it was easy and welcoming," she says.  Through a TheatreIV production of The Wind in the Willows, she met SPARC co-founders Jeri Cutler-Voltz and Jennie Brown. "What I remember about Jeri is that she wanted professional artists teaching theater," Clinton says. "It lent validity to what we wanted to do." She continued working at restaurants like Matt's British Pub, where she watched the renowned Liz Marks perform cabaret. "I thought, that's what I want to do," she says. She was later hired by Marks as a singing waitress on board the Annabel Lee. She joined the touring Richmond Theatre Co. with colleagues like Gayle Turner and Melissa Johnston Price. She also wrote and directed. Clinton met her husband while working at the former Caffe di Pagliacci. Tim Clinton, a cook, asked Debra out on the day she quit the restaurant to join the cast of Lucky Stiff at Hanover Tavern. They soon married and had a son, Josh. A graduate of Emerson College in Boston, where she earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in dramatic arts with a concentration in acting, Clinton attended Virginia Commonwealth University graduate school for a teaching degree. There, she was among the last students of esteemed theater professors James Parker and Kenneth Campbell. After moving back to New York during the late 1990s, the Clintons returned to Richmond following the birth of their daughter, Hanna. Debra taught in Amelia County, and resumed her association with SPARC, going full-time as a teacher there in 2007. She now holds the title of director of production, her first office job. Through SPARC, she's created projects with Jason Marks, including the musical Big Talent, produced last summer. She cites writing with Marks as one of the best experiences of her artistic life. Clinton has also directed the Jewish Family Theatre for seven seasons. She says it's exciting to watch people who aren't stage professionals become transformed. She still acts, including a performance in Henley Street Theatre's 2010 production of The Winter's Tale. Director James Ricks saw her as a "surly housekeeper" in TheatreIV's The Sound of Music and cast her in the role of Sicilian noblewoman Paulina, much to her surprise. Clinton says of her life in theater, "I have a joy in my life that fulfills me and other people, too. And that's a gift. It gives my life compass, a meaning and shape."—HK

16th Annual Pollak Prize Winners

Andras Bality • Cheryl Pallant • Tom Chenoweth • Regula Franz • Rick Alverson

1708 Gallery's InLight • Maggie Ingram • Arnott Mader • Debra Clinton