Four San Jose artists honored at 10th annual Leigh Weimers Emerging Artists Awards

Four distinct San Jose artists became the latest recipients of this year’s Leigh Weimers Emerging Artists Awards.

This year’s honorees — who were recognized Wednesday at a Rotary Club of San Jose ceremony — are musician Lauren Halliwell, composer and sound designer George Psarras, performance artist Nick Rodrigues and visual artist Ji Young Yoon. Each will receive $5,000 in grants to support their future work

The awards program, started by the Rotary Club was created in honor of former Mercury News columnist Leigh Weimers, who often wrote about the local arts community and platformed local artists to larger audiences. Now in its tenth year, the awards program was created to celebrate Weimers’ life and to continue fostering the local arts scene he loved.

“That’s what makes these awards so great — they are the perfect way to honor his memory and to preserve his legacy and love for the arts, and that’s why they’re so important to me,” said his daughter, Kristin Weimers.

Halliwell, a jazz and blues musician, said she’s been an artist for as long as she can remember and wants to use the money she was awarded to continue growing and evolving as a performer.

“If you’ve stopped doing that and you feel like you’ve reached the end, that you’ve peaked, in my opinion, that’s not a good sign,” Halliwell said. “We need to keep going, keep getting momentum, keep learning. That’s why I’m so proud to be a recipient of this award this year.”

Yoon, a visual artist, said she began her journey as an oil painter after studying chemistry, pursuing a career in fashion merchandising, and moving around between the United States, South Korea, Germany and Chile. She returned to the Bay Area in 2019 and recently completed her second MFA, focusing on fine art and creating a body of work focused on cityscapes in the Bay Area.

“I was 33 and I thought it was too late to start something new,” Yoon said. “Since I had zero experience in painting, I had to spend many extra hours practicing, but I really, truly enjoyed every bit of my three years of learning from the best instructors.”

Psarras, a composer and sound designer, is the first artist in his discipline to receive a Leigh Weimers award. As an artist who works regularly in theater, TV, film, voiceover and video games, his work is often the backbone of a larger production and is fundamental to defining the themes and setting the tone of a larger story.

“It’s always special when your work gets recognized,” Psarras said.

Rodrigues, an actor, singer and dancer, said he’s always loved to sing, despite also being a “shy, awkward child with a crippling fear of public speaking.” When he, unknowingly, used the monologue of a female character to audition for a high school production of “Antony and Cleopatra,” he realized that the performing arts could be a powerful tool for subverting social norms.

“American theater is going through a renaissance of change and restructuring that opens up the door for more diverse and interesting stories to be told, and for old stories to be told in new ways,” Rodrigues said, adding that he tries to put those principles into practice as much as possible both onstage and off.

Each of the artists shared their work with the audience at the Rotary Club’s award ceremony on Wednesday.

Halliwell shared a rousing vocal performance. Yoon showcased several of her oil paintings and explained how each one was crafted. Psarras played clips from some of the productions he’s worked on and offered insight into how he uses music and sound to help tell stories. And Rodrigues delivered a strong vocal performance with a song from the musical “Pippin.”

The artists can use the grants to support their careers in whatever way would make it easier to continue being an artist, said Sarah Clish, chair of the Rotary Club committee that oversees the awards.

“I know of one young man who had been wanting to further the art he had done and publish it into a book, and he wrote to us to let us know he was successful in doing that,” Clish said. “And I had one artist tell me, ‘oh my gosh, it alleviated the need for my car payment, I can pay my car off, so now I don’t have to worry about that cash flow problem’ … In terms of what they use the money for, the answers are all around the map.”

After the ceremony, Kristin Weimers said while the arts scene in the South Bay is smaller than the one in nearby San Francisco, she hopes the awards and the grants given to recipients can help San Jose one day achieve the same reverence.

“My dad always pictured this as being a cultural destination,” she said. “And we’re just going to keep working on making that happen and supporting it, getting it one step closer.”