Marysville native awarded Guggenheim Fellowship
Jun. 23—A Marysville native was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for photography.
The fellowships are intended for individuals who have demonstrated "exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts," according to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation website.
"I've always known about it but you just realize the odds of getting it ... It's like the Academy Awards for a photographer," said Michael Jang, 70, who was born and raised in Marysville and now lives in San Francisco.
During the pandemic, Jang said he had a lot of time on his hands so he decided to go through the extensive application process, which included writing, getting letters of recommendation from established people, sending images, and submitting the application package.
"That's the kind of thing in the past years of being a family person and working, I didn't have time to do it," Jang said. "I spent five or six months working on it during the pandemic."
He proposed working on a 100-year history of his family.
Jang is the son of Woodrow and Dorothy Jang, who owned the now-closed Jay's Department Store on D Street in Marysville.
The family was also very involved in the community, including being elected to boards and participating in the Rotary Club, he said.
"Who wouldn't want to (do this)?" Jang said. "Just to bring attention to your own family's history."
He said the project will include photographs, films and historical items.
"I'm going back and getting historical documents and items ... It's pretty much about me and before I was born," Jang said. "It'll have images and films of me growing up all the way through high school, follow my life in art through college and the present."
The Guggenheim Fellowship will allow him to take a year to work on his project.
"It's a great honor," Jang said. "...I want it to be in an exhibition that travels after a year when it's compiled."
Jang graduated from Marysville High School in 1969, the California Institute of the Arts in 1973 and earned a master's from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1977. He was named to the Marysville High School Hall of Fame in 2017.
Jang's photographs are in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Cantor Arts Center, Asian Art Museum, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, New York Public Library, Royal Ontario Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, among others, according to the foundation.
