Awards totaling $5,000 were distributed to local and regional artists at the closing Gala of the 12th Annual Bronze Buffalo Festival and Paintout presented by the Owensboro Museum of Fine Art.
Thirty artists from Kentucky, Ohio, Texas and Indiana entered sixty-eight paintings documenting Owensboro and the surrounding area during the three day paint out and competition September 26-28.
Henderson Kentucky painter Terry Rone received the Swedish Match Best in Show Museum Purchase Award for a painting entitled “Dry Summer”.
“Gala at the OMFA” by Louisville artist, Luci Mistratov, won the 1st Place Atmos Energy Museum Purchase Award and Texas resident and former Owensboroan, Jan Frazier, was awarded the 2nd Place Purchase Award. Winning the three top Merit Awards were Owensboroan Enid Roach and Marka Kroeger and Terry Rone, both of Henderson.
The exhibition was judged by John W. Streetman III, Director Emeritus of the Evansville Museum of Arts, History and Science.
The paint out is an annual “en plein air” (meaning painting out of doors) event at the local art museum designed to document the sense of place and historical significance of Owensboro and Daviess County, through the visual arts. The Bronze Buffalo Festival and Gala were named for the historical events that led to the establishment of the City of Owensboro in the early 1800s.
Frederica Street, the city’s major thoroughfare was originally a buffalo trace created by centuries of thundering herds of buffalo making their way from the salt licks in southern Daviess County to the banks of the Ohio River to drink. Early settlers followed the trace to establish the settlements which eventually became Owensboro.
That history is commemorated by the art museum’s Ryan Sculpture Park which features monumental bronze buffalo sculpture accompanied by a bronze Native American hunter celebrating the tribes that hunted buffalo in Kentucky.