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RIVERSIDE, Calif. (www.ucr.edu) -- Uta Barth, a studio art professor at the University of California, Riverside, received a 2004 Guggenheim Fellowship to support her photography. She is among 185 artists, scholars and scientists selected this year from nearly 2,800 applicants in the U.S. and Canada.

The foundation awards cash fellowships — almost $7 million just this year - for distinguished individual achievement and exceptional promise, according to Edward Hirsch, president of the New York-based Guggenheim Foundation.

Former United States Senator and Mrs. Simon Guggenheim endowed The Guggenheim Foundation in 1925 to memorialize their son, John, who died three years earlier. Some of the most famous Guggenheim Fellows are Ansel Adams, Aaron Copland, Langston Hughes, Henry Kissinger, Vladimir Nabokov and Linus Pauling.

Barth’s fellowship will allow her to pursue her photography during the 2005-2006 academic year. “I will spend part of the year in New York and part of it working in my studio in Los Angeles,” she said. She is known for an abstract photography, intentionally blurred and off center. "The images lack focus because the camera's attention is somewhere else," she said in one interview. "Many of the compositions, while clearly deliberate and carefully arranged in relation to the picture's edge, are awkward, off balance and formally suggest a missing element."

Uta Barth was born in Berlin, Germany and now lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio; Parco Gallery, Tokyo; the De Appel Foundation, Amsterdam; IKON Gallery, Birmingham, England; and the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art in Malmo, Sweden.

Recent projects include commissioned works for the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico and for the Tate Gallery of Modern Art in London. A traveling survey exhibition of her work was organized by the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle in Fall 2000.

Other current or former UCR faculty members have also won Guggenheim Fellowships, one of the most prestigious awards in academia. The most recent recipients are: John Ganim, English and Dale Kent, history, 2001, Amelia Jones, art history, 2000, Carole Fabricant, English, 1999; Susan Straight, creative writing, 1997; Rudolph Conrad, art history, 1994; Francesca Rochberg, history, 1993; and Jill Giegerich, art, 1992.

Barth mentions that six of the eight current faculty in the art department are Guggenheim fellows. "Jim Isermann and Charles Long received their grants in the last three or four years," she said.

The full list of 2004 Fellows is on the World Wide Web at http://www.gf.org.

The University of California, Riverside (www.ucr.edu) is a doctoral research university, a living laboratory for groundbreaking exploration of issues critical to Inland Southern California, the state and communities around the world. Reflecting California's diverse culture, UCR's enrollment has exceeded 20,500 students. The campus will open a medical school in 2013 and has reached the heart of the Coachella Valley by way of the UCR Palm Desert Center. The campus has an annual statewide economic impact of more than $1 billion.

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