It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving artist or person. In honor of the 25th anniversary of Artscape, the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts awarded a $25,000 cash prize to a regional artist July 14 at an evening ceremony outside the Brown Center on the campus of the Maryland Institute College of Art. A panel of five judges—Katherine Carl, the Drawing Center curator; Kathy Grayon, Deitch Projects gallery director; Matthew Higgs, White Columns director/curator; and artist Scott Hug, all of New York; and Bates College professor/artist William Pope of Maine—awarded the debut Janet and Walter Sondheim Prize, named after the longtime Baltimore civic leader and his late wife, to performance artist/sculptor Laure Drogoul.

Drogoul, 47, is a longtime fixture in Baltimore’s arts community, underground or otherwise. She founded and runs the 14-Karat Cabaret on West Saratoga Street, a vital hub of experimental creative energy since the 1980s, and her bewitching performance pieces and large-scale mixed-media installations have been fixtures in local galleries for just as long. Her “The Root (blue-eyed)” (pictured), a room-filling version of a traditional Japanese dress toggle, is a paper-covered, wood-framed devil head with video screen electric blue eyes and can be seen in the Meyerhoff and Decker galleries of MICA’s Fox Building through July 30, alongside works of the other seven Sondheim finalists—Eric Dyer, Jason Hughes, Gabriel Martinez, David Page, René Treviño, P. Daniel Witmer, and Jason Zimmerman.

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