Two Dartmouth faculty members -- Susan Jane Walp, lecturer in studio art and Larry Polansky, associate professor of music -- have been awarded fellowships from the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
The 2004 fellowship winners include 185 artists, scholars and scientists selected from more than 3,200 applicants for grants that averaged to more than $37,000 per recipient.
Walp specializes in still life paintings. In the future, she plans to pursue figure compositions, and some of the Guggenheim money will support hiring models.
Since coming to the College in 1998, Walp has instructed students in Drawing 1, 2 and 3.
Polansky, the 1922 Joseph Strauss professor of music, and chair of the music department, is a guitarist, writer and a composer of music for a wide variety of acoustic and electro-acoustic instruments and ensembles.
Polansky is a also the co-director of both the Frog Peak Music, a composers' collective and the Bregman electronic music studio.
In recent terms, Polansky has taught courses including "Sound and Animation" and "Music and Computers."
With this year's announcement, 34 Dartmouth professors in total have received the award since the award's since the Guggenheim Foundation was formed in 1925.
Recent Dartmouth recipients of the Guggenheim prize include economics professor Douglas Irwin and history professor Bruce Nelson in 2002; computer science Professor Bruce Randall Donald and French professor Marianne Hirsch in 2001; Russian professor Lev Loseff in 2000 and geography professor Richard Wright.
In 1985, three Dartmouth professors won the award.
Walp received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Mount Holyoke College, and continued her study of art at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Master of Fine Arts program at Brooklyn College.
Polansky earned a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics and music from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1976.
Polansky also received a master's in composition at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1978.
Walp and Polansky were no strangers to the award podium prior to receiving Guggenheim nods.
In the past, Polansky has garnered prestigious awards in his field including the BMI Young Composers Award, First Prize in the Young Composers of the Western States Competition and the Sony Music Fellowship.
Walp has won numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.
Since its creation, the Guggenheim Foundation has granted more than $230 million in fellowships to more than 15,500 individuals.
Famous past fellows include photographer Ansel Adams, composer Aaron Copland, poet Langston Hughes, diplomat and presidential adviser Henry Kissinger, scientist Linus Pauling, Martha Graham and writers Philip Roth and Eudora Welty, among others.
