Tanja Softić

Tanja Softić (born 1966, in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina)^[1] is a Professor of Art at the University of Richmond in Richmond, Virginia.^[2] After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Sarajevo,^[3] she moved to the United States and in 1992 earned an M.F.A. in Printmaking from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.^[4]

Biography

Softić goes back to Sarajevo every year to visit her family. In the summer of 2013 she began to take photographs of the devastation she saw there, especially of the cultural institutions and the museums and libraries she had once enjoyed. The end result is an exhibition of photographs that Softić describes as “a personal essay in photographic form,” and an online essay on the topic.^[5][6]

Softić collaborated with colleagues at the University of Richmond to organize and produce a fall semester 2015 series of events about the situation of her native Bosnia. The series marks the anniversaries of both the Srebrenica Massacre and the anniversary of the Dayton Peace Accords of 1995 which ended the three-and-a-half years of genocidal war.^[7] The series documents that in July 1995 more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed in and around the town of Srebrenica by units of the Army of Republika Srpska under the command of General Ratko Mladić. ^[8][9]

Teaching career

She documented the state of the arts in Sarajevo for the University of Richmond Newsroom site.^[10][11] In addition to her professorship at the University of Richmond, she participated with various print ateliers in the production of her prints and taught at other workshops and academic settings. She worked on print projects at Flying Horse Press, Tamarind Institute, and Anderson Ranch's Patton Print Studio. She printed at Kathy Caraccio Etching Studio in New York from 1991-92. She worked on a collaboration called Drawn from the McClung, a collection of drawings of objects from the McClung Museum at the University of Tennessee.^[12]

Grants and awards

She is a 2009 recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Grant. She was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts/ Southern Arts Federation Visual Artist Fellowship, and the Soros Foundation—Open Society Institute Exhibition Support Grant. Her prints were included in the 12th International Print Triennial in Cracow, Poland. She won a First Prize at the 5th Kōchi International Triennial Exhibition of Prints, Ino-cho Paper Museum in Ino, Kōchi, Japan in 2002. The Virginia Commission for the Arts awarded her a painting fellowship in 2004. She was awarded a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Artist Fellowship in Drawing in 2009, and in 2012 she received the Theresa Pollak Award for Excellence in Visual Arts, Richmond, Virginia.

Collections with art by Tanja Softić

Her art is included in the collections of the New York Public Library, Library of Congress Print Department, and the New South Wales Gallery of Art in Sydney, Australia. She has art in the One/Off Printmakers group portfolio collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. She has been a featured artist of the American curator Mark Sloan.^[13]

Exhibitions

In 1997, her art was shown in the Southern Arts Federation/ National Endowment for the Arts 1996 Fellowship Exhibition at Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA), Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In 1999, Tanja Softić: Grafiche e Libri was exhibited at Scuola Internazionale di Grafica di Venezia, in Venice Italy. In 2004, she exhibited in Meridian/Meridien, Prints by Members of the One/Off Group, Atelier Circulaire, Montreal, Canada.

A two-person show featuring Jonathan Hills, sculptor, and the prints of Tanja Softić was shown at the College of Charleston.^[14] At Tufts University, a large installation by Tanja Softić of ten works on paper mounted on panels, Migrant Universe, was on view January 30 – April 27, 2014 in the Koppelman Gallery and Remis Sculpture Court. The exhibition was organized by the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, College of Charleston, SC, with an accompanying brochure and video. ^[15][16][17]

In Richmond her art has been exhibited in many venues, including Reynolds Gallery^[18] and Page Bond Gallery^[19] She has gallery representation in Norfolk, Virginia with Mayer Fine Art Gallery.^[20]

References