Visual artist Joe Hendrick and choreographer Colleen Hendrick have received the 1993 Lillian Fairchild Award for excellence in choreography and set design.
The award, administered by the University of Rochester, is customarily given to a Rochester area resident who has produced during the past year the best visual, literary, or musical work of art. The Hendricks were chosen for Days Swinging Home, a 40- minute, modern dance work set to the original music composition of Dan Lansing Brumley. This marks the 68th time the Fairchild Award has been given.
Days Swinging Home premiered in 1993 at the Pyramid Arts Center and played again at Monroe Community College in February 1994. The piece ponders ancestral roots, Colleen Hendrick says, by looking at what we have borrowed from our ancestors and what we have changed along the way. Performed in three acts, it explores ancestry, childhood, and the present. The piece was danced by Colleen Hendrick, Rachel Chalmers, Valentin Ortolaza Jr., Emily Gayeski, Jaroslaw Zydowicz, and Cami Sholts.
Colleen Hendrick, who owns the Hendrick Dance Project, studied dance at the Hochstein School and Garth Fagan's school. She has worked as an independent choreographer since 1985. Her company comprises two men and four women. Students pay for HDP classes, but free classes and performances for area youth are available through the HDP Youth Project, which is heavily funded by local foundations.
Her father, Joe Hendrick, is a professor of art at Monroe Community College, where he has taught since 1974. He designed a modern, abstract set, made mostly of found objects, for Days Swinging Home. Hendrick has produced work in architecture, fine art, commercial illustration, mixed media, and performance art. He has exhibited his fine art in numerous galleries around the country; his commercial art and illustrations appear on book and album covers, as well as in the pages of magazines, children's books, and corporate publications. His cast stone sculptures for Rochester's School #7 recently were selected by the Smithsonian Institute as a significant public sculpture and will be maintained by the Institute. Hendrick is a founding member of several arts organizations, including the Pyramid Arts Center, and has served as a juror for the New York Foundation of the Arts.
The Fairchild Award was established by Herman L. Fairchild of the University's Department of Geology in memory of his daughter Lillian, an accomplished designer who died of tuberculosis in 1910 at age 32. The first award was given in 1924.
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