The Fresno Arts Council will hold its 18th Annual Horizon Awards

For Immediate Release
Thursday, November 14, 2002
Fresno Arts Council

The Fresno Arts Council will hold its 18th Annual Horizon Awards Thursday, November 21, 2002 from 6 - 8 p.m. at Fresno City Hall - Second Floor   The Horizon Awards were initiated in 1984 to recognize individuals, organizations and businesses that have made outstanding contributions to the community through the arts.

Following are the categories and recipients:

Youth: Erynn Richardson, a senior student at Hoover High School
Erynn Richardson is involved in four disciplines -- fine art, drama, music, and literature, and has excelled in all. Her artwork has been exhibited at the Madera Fair, the Fresno Fair, and she has shown at the California State Fair. She has won many awards including "Best of Show". She successfully completed an extensive college level art portfolio for submission as a senior, and has received academic awards in art (three years in a row), english and theater arts.

Artist: John Chookasian and the Chookasian Armenian Ensemble
John Chookasian is the founder and clarinetist for the Ensemble, which presents traditional Eastern and Western Armenian music and culture. The Ensemble was organized in 1994 and traveled throughout Armenia in 1999, receiving a National Gold Medal from the Armenian Government.

Business: Education Employees Credit Union
Under the direction of Bruce Barnett, the EECU has for over a decade sought to seek out and support local artists, and participated in the CSUF Summer Arts program, which included student scholarships.

The Fresno Art Museum was able through the generosity of the EECU to provide an after school class for at-risk students, which is held in the Childspace Gallery. It is an annually funded program by the EECU.

Due to the generosity of the EECU, school children from low-income schools visit the Metropolitan Museum free of charge.

In addition to other opportunities awarded to students in Fresno, Tulare, Selma and Kings County, the EECU continues its "Educator of the Year" awards program in which selected teachers, administrators and classified employees are honored.

Citizen: Dotty Abbate
A lifetime of volunteer work in the arts. She was appointed 1967 to the California Arts Commission by Governor Reagan and served for 10 years. Dotty restored the Tower Theater and helped finance and remodel the Daily Planet and Butterfield's Brewery.

(Excerpted from 1994 Bee profile) Owner of the the Tower Theater and Pacific Produce...Aileen Dotty Abbate is an instrumental force in creating arenas for artistic expression...she began volunteering for various organizations including the Fresno Art Museum, the Fresno Philharmonic, Fresno Historical Society and Junior League of Fresno...her most recent and, some would say, most notable contribution to Fresno's arts community was the renovation of the Tower Theater from a movie house into a performing arts facility. "it was a spiritual experience o develop the theater, Abbate says, "I just knew this could be a theater. Something told me that I couldn't let it become a parking lot."

Ella Odorfer Educator: Margaret Hudson
Margaret has worked her life as an artist, sharing her studios with youth.

The Fresno Bee's Sunday, November 3 article describes her and her artistry very well: "...Hudson's distinctive sculptures, mass-produced at her Earth Arts Studio about a mile from her home in north central Fresno, have made her one of Fresno's best known artists...There is something comforting about Hudson's work. It's easy to fall under the spell of her beguiling birds and animals because they reflect her kind, gentle vision of the world...But the sculptures don't tell the whole story. Behind the smiling faces of Hudson's happy little critters stands a serious artist who has experienced both joy and sorrow in her 75 years on planet Earth."

Special: Radio Bilingüe
Radio Bilingue has served the bilingual and Spanish-speaking community for over 30 years, developing from a small operation in Fresno to a network that extends nationwide and into Mexico. Their annual Mariachi Festival in March at the Fresno Convention Center has grown from a backyard fundraiser to an audience of 12,000 annually.

Radio Bilingüe broadcasts in Spanish, English, Hmong, Portuguese, and Mixteca: A bilingual program in la lengua Mixteca and Spanish featuring Oaxacan folk music from Southern México. The program provides information and public service announcements relevant to migrant Mixtec workers on both sides of the border. This program frequently links via telephone with Mixtec radio stations in the states of Baja California and Oaxaca in México; salutations from listeners calling from the fields on the West Coast are often aired.

The Hmong folk and contemporary music program is brought to Radio Bilingüe by refugees from their ancestral home in the Laotian highlands; it includes a public affairs talk program.

Radio Bilingüe's International program showcases traditional music from diverse areas of the world, from bluegrass to charangos, from Celtic to Filipino songs. One Sunday per month is dedicated to Brazilian music.

The Fresno Arts Council is a private, non-profit organization that was established in 1979 under the name Alliance for the Arts by local artists, arts organizations and interested individuals who wished to create a voice for the arts in the central San Joaquin Valley. In 1989, the by-laws were amended to reflect a change in name to Fresno Arts Council.

In 1980, the County Board of Supervisors appointed the Fresno Arts Council as the local partner to the California Arts Council.

The City of Fresno designated the Fresno Arts Council as their official Arts Agency and defined our role in police, planning and budgetary issues in a Memo of Understanding that was passed by the City Council in 1989.