The Maine Arts Commission will honor recipients of its 2008 Traditional and Contemporary Arts Fellowship awards at 5:30 p.m. Oct. 4 at the Penobscot Theatre in Bangor.

This year’s winners are dancer Karen Montanaro of Casco, performing arts; artist Sam Van Aken of Portland, visual arts; writer Jeff Thomson of Farmington, literary arts; and Molly Neptune Parker , a Passamaqouddy elder from Princeton, traditional arts.

The fellowships honor artists in multiple disciplines from across the state.
Winners receive $13,000 each. This year’s recipients were chosen from among 198 applicants, and all four will present programs at the theater.

Parker will demonstrate the traditional art of basketmaking, which she began learning as a child. Her baskets are displayed in the Smithsonian Institute of Natural History, the Hudson Museum and the Abbe Museum.

Van Aken had a solo installation at Colby College in 2005, and last year received the Association of International Critics of Art Exhibition Award, and was honored by the Dallas Video Art Festival. He was visiting artist at the l’Ecole Nationale Superieure d’Arts de Cergy-Pointoise, France, and in 2007 he was artist in residence in Tacheles Art Center in Berlin, Germany.

Thomson is assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Maine-Farmington. He is the author of several books, and has published poems, creative nonfiction, critical essays, conference papers, book reviews and other projects. His recent honors and awards include the 2006 Individual Creative Artists Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the 2005 Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers Conference in 2005.

At the ceremony, Montanaro will present her piece, “The Struggle To Be,” which will merge dance and mime. She has danced professionally with the Ohio Ballet and the Darmstadt Opera Ballet in Germany, and currently is currently a principal dancer with Portland Ballet.