Five Years Out Art Challenge: 2015 Winner and Finalists

When artist Jennifer Ivanovic heard about the Arrow Electronics “Five Years Out” Art Challenge at the Cherry Creek Arts Festival in Denver, she didn’t pick up her paint brush. She picked up a screwdriver.

With it, she pried open cans of acrylic paint and started pouring. Sixteen gallons later, her wall-sized color field creation “Metamorphasis” emerged.

For the third consecutive year, Arrow partnered with the festival to conduct a national challenge to artists: Take the concept of innovation and express what Five Years Out looks like.

From a competitive, global application pool of artists, jurors selected Ivanovic as the 2015 winner of the Five Years Out Art Challenge. She received $10,000 and a jury-exempt invitation to exhibit at next year’s festival. Four other finalists received $5,000 commissions.

The massive, free-formed painting on plywood is based on several concentric pours and bullseye pours. Hidden within the connected bull’s-eye pours are caterpillars, cocoons and hundreds of painted butterflies swirling from the center of the work. The pours are symbolic of continuous drips of radiating innovation.

The jurors wrote:  “The beauty of "Metamorphosis" shows complex painting skills, a hypnotic color palette and a large scale collaboration with a force of nature—gravity.”

“Five Years Out challenged me,” said artist Jennifer Ivanovich of Fort Collins, CO.  “I certainly was inspired to work in the beyond.”

The works of all the finalists were displayed at the festival in Denver on July 4-6. Their works now belong to Arrow’s art collection and are being displayed at company locations worldwide. The finalists include:

“As the Cherry Creek Arts Festival celebrates its 25^th anniversary, Arrow is thrilled to again partner on the Five Years Out Arrow Art Challenge,” said Richard Kylberg, vice president of Corporate Communications and Global Marketing at Arrow. “The Arts Festival, like Arrow, has fueled innovative thinking, inspiring people to reconsider how to transform what’s possible into what’s practical now and Five Years Out.”

 Arrow, ranked #138 on the Fortune 500 list, made Colorado the company’s headquarters in 2011. As a cultural innovator, the Cherry Creek Arts Festival has been delivering world-class arts experiences and education to the Colorado community for 25 years. The partnership with fellow innovator Arrow inspires a movement to guide artistic creation and evolution forward.

 For more information about the Five Years Out Arrow Art Challenge, please visit http://www.arrow.com/arts/ and www.cherryarts.org/ArrowFiveYearsOut