LETTERS OF RECOMMENDATION
From:
Vivian Zavataro, Executive and Creative Director
Ulrich Museum of Art
Wichita State University
1845 Fairmount Street
Wichita, KS 67260-0046
Ph 316-978-3664
[email protected]
Re:
Denita Benyshek, Applicant
To Whom It May Concern,
I am writing to enthusiastically recommend Dr. Denita Benyshek, artist, writer, and researcher, for an Enabling Grant. As the Executive Director of the Ulrich Museum of Art, I’ve conversed with Dr. Benyshek at museum events. I recently made a studio visit and saw her artwork in her home. She is a prolific artist, frequently posting new works of art on Facebook and Instagram. Although she returned to Kansas in April 2022, she is already an active, contributing member of the art community in Wichita. As an individual, Dr. Benyshek is authentic, thoughtful, engaged, organized, timely, responsible, and humble, committed to contributing to society.
As I learned more about Dr. Benyshek’s research and publication career, I asked her to assist with an Ulrich Museum grant application. Due to her familiarity with rural Kansas, as well as her doctoral studies in the psychology of creativity, she offered several new ideas that enhanced the grant program. I invited her, as an artist, to join the grant program’s team of curators and artists and I also asked her to write a scholarly essay for a fully illustrated publication accompanying the future exhibit.
As an artist, she is a master of her craft. Her work was chosen for several important public art collections in the northwest and her artworks were included in exhibits at: Bellevue Museum of Art, WA; Coos Bay Museum, OR; Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle; Whatcom Museum of History and Art, Bellingham, WA; Museum of Fine Arts, Owensboro, KY; Yakima Valley Museum of Art, WA; Salina Art Center, KS; Washington Center, Olympia, WA; Mulvane Art Center, Topeka, KS; and the Citizens Cultural Center in Fujinomiya, Japan.
Due to an art gallery-related trauma, Dr. Benyshek chose to discontinue exhibiting for some years. She was also caring for her disabled son and his complex medical needs. Despite these setbacks, she demonstrated resilience, transformative healing, and the ability to continue making beautiful, meaningful paintings. In the process of retiring from mental health counseling, she works very part-time so that she has more time to devote to creating art. Over the past two years, she created two new series of paintings, planted a new garden around her home, and authored a book of poetry.
Given her previous career achievements, I consider Dr. Benyshek to be a reemerging artist. An Enabling Grant from the Koch Cultural Trust will provide support and encouragement to her at this important juncture in her career. I recommend her without reservation!
Please feel free to contact me at 316-978-3664 or [email protected] if you have any questions or need further elaboration on Dr. Benyshek’s artistic talent and many career achievements.
Sincerely,
Vivian Zavataro, Executive and Creative Director
Ulrich Museum of Art
Ksenya Gurshtein <[email protected]>
To Whom It May Concern:
Wed, Feb 28, 2024 at 5:07 PM
I’m writing this letter to recommend Denita Benyshek for the Koch Cultural Trust Enabling Grant. She is a very talented visual artist whose life circumstances have made making art challenging in recent years. With the resources of this grant, I am confident she will be able to produce new exceptional artistic work, find and pursue opportunities to exhibit and otherwise share her artistry, and enrich the cultural life of Wichita and beyond both with her work and her insight as an artist, therapist, and caretaker of a disabled family member into the important relationships between art, creativity, and healing.
I first met Denita two years ago, when she first moved back from the Pacific Northwest to Wichita, where she grew up and attended college. At the time, I was the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University. Denita frequently came to exhibitions and events at the museum, and I was impressed from the start by the degree of her engagement with the art on view and the speakers we brought in, her intelligent commentary on both, and her incisive questions. I was also impressed with the rapidity with which she became a noticeable part of Wichita’s arts scene and cultural life, and glad to hear her comment that she felt very welcomed and embraced by this community.
I first saw Denita’s artwork in person soon after and was struck by the effortless elegance of her draughtsmanship and her innate impulse to see and capture the beauty she sees in the world around her— an impulse that manifests itself first and foremost in traditional drawing and painting, but can also be found in furniture Denita has painted, the garden she has planted from scratch, her photographs of places she has visited, etc. I learned that although she has always aspired to be a visual artist and clearly is one in the way she thinks about the world, Denita had largely abandoned attempts to engage with traditional arts institutions (i.e., commercial art galleries, museums, art centers, etc.) after receiving her BFA, partly due to the need to work full-time to care for disabled son as a single parent, and in large part because of the discouragement she received from others as a woman artist and a non- traditional creative in an environment that, unfortunately, often values professionalization over talent and vision.
In the time I’ve known her in Wichita, I’ve seen Denita blossom as she has returned to her interest in making art, and she has been remarkably productive, creating hundreds of beautiful drawings despite the pressures of the COVID pandemic and the on-going struggles to get her son the medical care he needs. She is energized by the possibility of turning those drawings into both a book and stunning digital mandala-like collages. I see a lot of clear potential for her work to be exhibited at prominent local institutions and disseminated in book form, as well as likely ultimately successful in a commercial gallery setting, e.g. at a venue like Wichita’s Reuben Saunders Gallery. As I mentioned earlier, since she’s a trained and gifted therapist, I’ve also consistently found Denita to be a source of deep insight about the relationship between art, creativity, and healing. This insight is both rooted in her personal experiences and has wide applicability to others. I believe supporting Denita’s artistic projects will also mean
amplifying her voice in our community, and I strongly believe it’s a voice that others will value hearing in conjunction with seeing her beautiful work.
Thank you in advance for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Ksenya Gurshtein
Curator / Art Historian / Arts Writer / Translator
Email: [email protected]
Cell: 316.250.1760
KATHLEEN E. SHANAHAN
402 S. Lynwood Blvd.
WICHITA KS 67218
February 27, 2024
RE: Recommendation for applicant Denita Benyshek
Dear Sir or Madam:
I am happy to write this letter of recommendation for Denita Benyshek.
I first met Dr. Denita Benyshek when I was Associate Professor of Painting and
Drawing at the School of Art of Design at Wichita State University in approximately
1983. She went on to the Northwest to study and establish her therapy practice. It
was not until 2023 upon her return, that we resumed our friendship and artistic
exchange.
Denita maintains her psychology practice while caring for her son who has serious
health challenges. She is his sole care giver. Because of related demands, there has
been a break in her exhibition record. With her return to Kansas, she is striving to
reestablish her art career regionally. She is charged and forward thinking in her
zeal toward this end. Denita, well prepared with a BFA and MFA, further
strengthened her foundation as an artist through the study of the psychology of
creativity.
Denita’s recent work, largely done on site during her artist residency at Wichita’s
Botanica, and in her own garden, is highly engaging to the senses and the
imagination – dreamily atmospheric, it lends itself to meditative states and the
ethereal realm. Not only pictorial representations, these images communicate
temperature, humidity and mood, much like the works of American landscape
painter Charles Burchfield, whose images appear as precursors of Disney- like
flights of nature fancy.
Art is very much a practice for Dr. Benyshek. Professionally and personally she is
committed to the psychology of creativity and the therapeutic value of art in the
context of mental health. With her extensive skill set and her dual role as artist and
therapist, she fully employs art as a healing modality. She is facile and in command
of her media. Resulting art work often reflects fantasy and the spiritual realm.
She has several possible exhibition venues lined up, as well as ongoing support for
the publication of a book of her paintings coupled with poetry. These projects will require
financial outlay. I highly recommend Danita for the Koch Trust Enabling
Grant. Please give her your full consideration and support.
Respectfully,
Kathleen Shanahan
Artist and Former Associate Professor at Wichita State University
February 27, 2024
To whom it may concern:
This letter is in support of Denita Benyshek’s grant request. I am a professional visual artist living in the Pacific Northwest – and a lifelong student of poetry, history, and the arts.
Denita is a re-emerging visual artist of great talent whose work I have followed for well over a year. In our conversations, I have found her engaged deeply in the creative process. She is both a creator and a teacher.
Her work Into the Garden is a delightful collection working within the aesthetic context that has a long tradition of capturing the restorative and health-giving nature of cultivation and gardens. Into the Garden also reminds us of poets such as Andrew Marvell, Theodore Roethke, and Dylan Thomas, for whom the garden was central to the creative impulse. This work has about it the fluidity of Matisse or Monet and yet there are also interesting moments similar to scientific illustration. The effect is to create a peaceful, organic series that is unafraid of being openly beautiful.
And this is not a strident, clenched-fist, style of edgy art. Benyshek is not an artist steeped in irony or controversy. Rather, Benyshek’s art captures a fundamental, delicate feel of growth in a green world.
Benyshek’s work as artist-in-residence at the Wichita Botanic Gardens created a unique tapestry that is highly accessible to those with a trained eye and likewise to the viewer who comes to the work with no aesthetic preconceptions.
In an age given to challenge natural beauty, Benyshek is straightforward in embracing a tradition that works to make art that simply pleases and comforts. She works, rather, from the fundamental notion of the beauty of the cultivated garden. And from that setting, she brings to us a calm, delicate, longed-for sense of well-being and growth.
She brings a strong commitment to the creative process. And seeing her work imparts to the viewer a sense of having found an age-less, quiet, contemplative space that is much longed for in this modern world.
Sincerely,
Stephen R. Costie
[email protected]
February 26, 2024
Dear Committee,
I am the editor of Coreopsis: A Journal of Myth and Theater, a small, peer reviewed, arts journal and the newly inaugurated Roses and Wildflowers Magazine of Mythopoeia and Fabulism, both published by the Society for Ritual Arts, a non-profit located primarily in Berkeley, CA.
I have known Denita Benyshek as a colleague for several years through the graduate program we both attended and professionally through the different arts organizations we have participated in.
As an artist, I have always admired and respected her unique vision. When the terrible breaks in her professional career occurred, it was with sorrow alternated with hope, and respect bordering on awe, that I witnessed her healing process and subsequent emergence as a powerful voice in her art and in her work as a counselor and scholar. In addition, her dedication to supporting her son, Hans, through his many health challenges is testament to her courage, compassion, and what I might call “parental fortitude.”
This current project is intriguing and it is with great pleasure that I recommend Dr. Benyshek for this grant.
We will be profiling Dr. Benyshek’s current work in the Autumn 2024 issue of Coreopsis Journal with an interview and a representative selection of her work in a web-based gallery. In addition, Dr. Benyshek’s artworks are appearing in the inaugural issue of Roses and Wildflowers (launched February 29th, 2024).
As an editor, it is most impressive that she has met every deadline without prompting and when asked, she always has exactly the right artwork to share and good advice for the design team to work with.
Denita Benyshek will be doing great things in the future, of which this project is one example. She is a person and an artist, in the tradition of the poet, Enheduanna, “of the largest heart.”
Yours,
Lezlie Kinyon, Ph.D., Editor.
From:
Vivian Zavataro, Executive and Creative Director
Ulrich Museum of Art
Wichita State University
1845 Fairmount Street
Wichita, KS 67260-0046
Ph 316-978-3664
[email protected]
Re:
Denita Benyshek, Applicant
To Whom It May Concern,
I am writing to enthusiastically recommend Dr. Denita Benyshek, artist, writer, and researcher, for an Enabling Grant. As the Executive Director of the Ulrich Museum of Art, I’ve conversed with Dr. Benyshek at museum events. I recently made a studio visit and saw her artwork in her home. She is a prolific artist, frequently posting new works of art on Facebook and Instagram. Although she returned to Kansas in April 2022, she is already an active, contributing member of the art community in Wichita. As an individual, Dr. Benyshek is authentic, thoughtful, engaged, organized, timely, responsible, and humble, committed to contributing to society.
As I learned more about Dr. Benyshek’s research and publication career, I asked her to assist with an Ulrich Museum grant application. Due to her familiarity with rural Kansas, as well as her doctoral studies in the psychology of creativity, she offered several new ideas that enhanced the grant program. I invited her, as an artist, to join the grant program’s team of curators and artists and I also asked her to write a scholarly essay for a fully illustrated publication accompanying the future exhibit.
As an artist, she is a master of her craft. Her work was chosen for several important public art collections in the northwest and her artworks were included in exhibits at: Bellevue Museum of Art, WA; Coos Bay Museum, OR; Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle; Whatcom Museum of History and Art, Bellingham, WA; Museum of Fine Arts, Owensboro, KY; Yakima Valley Museum of Art, WA; Salina Art Center, KS; Washington Center, Olympia, WA; Mulvane Art Center, Topeka, KS; and the Citizens Cultural Center in Fujinomiya, Japan.
Due to an art gallery-related trauma, Dr. Benyshek chose to discontinue exhibiting for some years. She was also caring for her disabled son and his complex medical needs. Despite these setbacks, she demonstrated resilience, transformative healing, and the ability to continue making beautiful, meaningful paintings. In the process of retiring from mental health counseling, she works very part-time so that she has more time to devote to creating art. Over the past two years, she created two new series of paintings, planted a new garden around her home, and authored a book of poetry.
Given her previous career achievements, I consider Dr. Benyshek to be a reemerging artist. An Enabling Grant from the Koch Cultural Trust will provide support and encouragement to her at this important juncture in her career. I recommend her without reservation!
Please feel free to contact me at 316-978-3664 or [email protected] if you have any questions or need further elaboration on Dr. Benyshek’s artistic talent and many career achievements.
Sincerely,
Vivian Zavataro, Executive and Creative Director
Ulrich Museum of Art
Ksenya Gurshtein <[email protected]>
To Whom It May Concern:
Wed, Feb 28, 2024 at 5:07 PM
I’m writing this letter to recommend Denita Benyshek for the Koch Cultural Trust Enabling Grant. She is a very talented visual artist whose life circumstances have made making art challenging in recent years. With the resources of this grant, I am confident she will be able to produce new exceptional artistic work, find and pursue opportunities to exhibit and otherwise share her artistry, and enrich the cultural life of Wichita and beyond both with her work and her insight as an artist, therapist, and caretaker of a disabled family member into the important relationships between art, creativity, and healing.
I first met Denita two years ago, when she first moved back from the Pacific Northwest to Wichita, where she grew up and attended college. At the time, I was the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University. Denita frequently came to exhibitions and events at the museum, and I was impressed from the start by the degree of her engagement with the art on view and the speakers we brought in, her intelligent commentary on both, and her incisive questions. I was also impressed with the rapidity with which she became a noticeable part of Wichita’s arts scene and cultural life, and glad to hear her comment that she felt very welcomed and embraced by this community.
I first saw Denita’s artwork in person soon after and was struck by the effortless elegance of her draughtsmanship and her innate impulse to see and capture the beauty she sees in the world around her— an impulse that manifests itself first and foremost in traditional drawing and painting, but can also be found in furniture Denita has painted, the garden she has planted from scratch, her photographs of places she has visited, etc. I learned that although she has always aspired to be a visual artist and clearly is one in the way she thinks about the world, Denita had largely abandoned attempts to engage with traditional arts institutions (i.e., commercial art galleries, museums, art centers, etc.) after receiving her BFA, partly due to the need to work full-time to care for disabled son as a single parent, and in large part because of the discouragement she received from others as a woman artist and a non- traditional creative in an environment that, unfortunately, often values professionalization over talent and vision.
In the time I’ve known her in Wichita, I’ve seen Denita blossom as she has returned to her interest in making art, and she has been remarkably productive, creating hundreds of beautiful drawings despite the pressures of the COVID pandemic and the on-going struggles to get her son the medical care he needs. She is energized by the possibility of turning those drawings into both a book and stunning digital mandala-like collages. I see a lot of clear potential for her work to be exhibited at prominent local institutions and disseminated in book form, as well as likely ultimately successful in a commercial gallery setting, e.g. at a venue like Wichita’s Reuben Saunders Gallery. As I mentioned earlier, since she’s a trained and gifted therapist, I’ve also consistently found Denita to be a source of deep insight about the relationship between art, creativity, and healing. This insight is both rooted in her personal experiences and has wide applicability to others. I believe supporting Denita’s artistic projects will also mean
amplifying her voice in our community, and I strongly believe it’s a voice that others will value hearing in conjunction with seeing her beautiful work.
Thank you in advance for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Ksenya Gurshtein
Curator / Art Historian / Arts Writer / Translator
Email: [email protected]
Cell: 316.250.1760
KATHLEEN E. SHANAHAN
402 S. Lynwood Blvd.
WICHITA KS 67218
February 27, 2024
RE: Recommendation for applicant Denita Benyshek
Dear Sir or Madam:
I am happy to write this letter of recommendation for Denita Benyshek.
I first met Dr. Denita Benyshek when I was Associate Professor of Painting and
Drawing at the School of Art of Design at Wichita State University in approximately
1983. She went on to the Northwest to study and establish her therapy practice. It
was not until 2023 upon her return, that we resumed our friendship and artistic
exchange.
Denita maintains her psychology practice while caring for her son who has serious
health challenges. She is his sole care giver. Because of related demands, there has
been a break in her exhibition record. With her return to Kansas, she is striving to
reestablish her art career regionally. She is charged and forward thinking in her
zeal toward this end. Denita, well prepared with a BFA and MFA, further
strengthened her foundation as an artist through the study of the psychology of
creativity.
Denita’s recent work, largely done on site during her artist residency at Wichita’s
Botanica, and in her own garden, is highly engaging to the senses and the
imagination – dreamily atmospheric, it lends itself to meditative states and the
ethereal realm. Not only pictorial representations, these images communicate
temperature, humidity and mood, much like the works of American landscape
painter Charles Burchfield, whose images appear as precursors of Disney- like
flights of nature fancy.
Art is very much a practice for Dr. Benyshek. Professionally and personally she is
committed to the psychology of creativity and the therapeutic value of art in the
context of mental health. With her extensive skill set and her dual role as artist and
therapist, she fully employs art as a healing modality. She is facile and in command
of her media. Resulting art work often reflects fantasy and the spiritual realm.
She has several possible exhibition venues lined up, as well as ongoing support for
the publication of a book of her paintings coupled with poetry. These projects will require
financial outlay. I highly recommend Danita for the Koch Trust Enabling
Grant. Please give her your full consideration and support.
Respectfully,
Kathleen Shanahan
Artist and Former Associate Professor at Wichita State University
February 27, 2024
To whom it may concern:
This letter is in support of Denita Benyshek’s grant request. I am a professional visual artist living in the Pacific Northwest – and a lifelong student of poetry, history, and the arts.
Denita is a re-emerging visual artist of great talent whose work I have followed for well over a year. In our conversations, I have found her engaged deeply in the creative process. She is both a creator and a teacher.
Her work Into the Garden is a delightful collection working within the aesthetic context that has a long tradition of capturing the restorative and health-giving nature of cultivation and gardens. Into the Garden also reminds us of poets such as Andrew Marvell, Theodore Roethke, and Dylan Thomas, for whom the garden was central to the creative impulse. This work has about it the fluidity of Matisse or Monet and yet there are also interesting moments similar to scientific illustration. The effect is to create a peaceful, organic series that is unafraid of being openly beautiful.
And this is not a strident, clenched-fist, style of edgy art. Benyshek is not an artist steeped in irony or controversy. Rather, Benyshek’s art captures a fundamental, delicate feel of growth in a green world.
Benyshek’s work as artist-in-residence at the Wichita Botanic Gardens created a unique tapestry that is highly accessible to those with a trained eye and likewise to the viewer who comes to the work with no aesthetic preconceptions.
In an age given to challenge natural beauty, Benyshek is straightforward in embracing a tradition that works to make art that simply pleases and comforts. She works, rather, from the fundamental notion of the beauty of the cultivated garden. And from that setting, she brings to us a calm, delicate, longed-for sense of well-being and growth.
She brings a strong commitment to the creative process. And seeing her work imparts to the viewer a sense of having found an age-less, quiet, contemplative space that is much longed for in this modern world.
Sincerely,
Stephen R. Costie
[email protected]
February 26, 2024
Dear Committee,
I am the editor of Coreopsis: A Journal of Myth and Theater, a small, peer reviewed, arts journal and the newly inaugurated Roses and Wildflowers Magazine of Mythopoeia and Fabulism, both published by the Society for Ritual Arts, a non-profit located primarily in Berkeley, CA.
I have known Denita Benyshek as a colleague for several years through the graduate program we both attended and professionally through the different arts organizations we have participated in.
As an artist, I have always admired and respected her unique vision. When the terrible breaks in her professional career occurred, it was with sorrow alternated with hope, and respect bordering on awe, that I witnessed her healing process and subsequent emergence as a powerful voice in her art and in her work as a counselor and scholar. In addition, her dedication to supporting her son, Hans, through his many health challenges is testament to her courage, compassion, and what I might call “parental fortitude.”
This current project is intriguing and it is with great pleasure that I recommend Dr. Benyshek for this grant.
We will be profiling Dr. Benyshek’s current work in the Autumn 2024 issue of Coreopsis Journal with an interview and a representative selection of her work in a web-based gallery. In addition, Dr. Benyshek’s artworks are appearing in the inaugural issue of Roses and Wildflowers (launched February 29th, 2024).
As an editor, it is most impressive that she has met every deadline without prompting and when asked, she always has exactly the right artwork to share and good advice for the design team to work with.
Denita Benyshek will be doing great things in the future, of which this project is one example. She is a person and an artist, in the tradition of the poet, Enheduanna, “of the largest heart.”
Yours,
Lezlie Kinyon, Ph.D., Editor.