National Choir to Receive Lifetime Award
The National Choir of the Cayman Islands heads up an impressive list of deserving recipients for the 2002 Cayman National Cultural Foundation's (CNCF) Arts Awards. The National Choir will receive the coveted CNCF Cultural Heritage Lifetime Achievement Award, The Radley Gourzong Award.
The Radley Gourzong Award is bestowed on individuals or groups whose work, or work with others, has in the long term made an outstanding contribution to the exploration, promotion or preservation of the Caymanian Cultural Heritage.
The National Choir fulfilled the criteria including the stipulation that the recipient should have produced a substantial body of work over time that demonstrates a local cultural focus and/or draws on local artistic traditions, techniques or materials.
Past recipients of the Radley Gourzong award include Herbert Martin, Lambert Seymour, Roy L. Bodden, Jacob McLaughlin, David Martins, George Nowak and Debbie van der Bol.
There will be two recipients of the CNCF Cultural Heritage Award, which is given to individuals or groups who, through a single work or a series of works in the short-medium term, have contributed significantly to the exploration, promotion or preservation of Caymanian cultural heritage. Ms. Annelee Ebanks will receive this award for Art and Craft, specifically the preservation of thatching as a tradition. The Cayman Maritime Heritage Association was chosen to receive this award for their preservation and promotion of our Caymanian seafaring traditions.
In the category of Artistic Achievement, Mitchell Olsen Ebanks, "Jah Mitch", is the only awardee for the CNCF Artistic Achievement Award, having demonstrated outstanding originality, creative insight and/or artistic merit in a single work or a series or works on related themes.
The fourth award, the CNCF Artistic Endeavour Award, will be given to Quincy Brown, Nickola McCoy and Gordon Solomon. These three individuals have fulfilled the stipulated criteria having demonstrated great potential for further development in their particular field through artistic merit, sustained commitment to further developing and improving their work and substantial growth and development of artistic talent in the short to medium term.
These awards will be conferred upon the recipients at the CNCF Arts Awards on December 9th at the Harquail Theatre.