Unheralded Burbank artist wins $200,000 in populist ArtPrize show
After taking more than three years off from the struggles of an emerging artist to become a mom, Adonna Khare of Burbank has returned in a big way.
She arrived home on Sunday after winning what’s probably the biggest people’s choice award in the arts: the $200,000 first prize in the ArtPrize competition that Rick DeVos, a scion of the Amway Corp. sales fortune, launched in Grand Rapids, Mich., in 2009.
Khare, 32, earned a master of fine arts degree from Cal State Long Beach in 2006, and has shown her carbon pencil drawings at the Lora Schlesinger Gallery in Santa Monica and the Municipal Art Gallery in L.A.’s Barnsdall Park. But she had remained among the ranks of little-known and underpaid aspiring artists.
Until Friday, when she won a monumental prize with a monumental carbon pencil mural called “Elephants.’
-- Mike Boehm, Los Angeles Times