What Is An Armond Award?
ARM + Mountain = Reaching the Top in your field of the Creative Arts
Arts Rescue Mission hosts A R M O N awards that come around once a year and are given to a variety disciplines in the Arts, This year honors Sub Stack writers, song writers, actors, a visual artist or two, and Houston's master Chefs. This year we believe you will agree that our A R M O N awards for our Master Chef artists are well deserved before desert is served. To nominate your favorite artists for next year click here. No rules here. Vote as often as you like.
THE ARMON AWARD (deriv/ noun ARM + MON) reach (verb): (rēcht), v.t. & v.i. Arrive at; to attain or accomplish + mountain: (moun′tᵊn), n. an obstacle requiring effort to overcome; success at a great Persoal cost.
Artists creating bottle designs began with Dan Allison's and Gertrude Barnstone's first fundraiser for the ARM at the Contemporary Art Museum in the 1994. This year we don't have time before this first ARMON Awards Night but this is how the tradition started: This year we're asking artists to send us their designs, we have one done already, but we're asking for more. We'll put them on the bottles and they can sign them at the ARMON Awards event.
The idea of having artists make one of a kind bottles as an element for the fundraiser that year came from board member Martha Claire Tompkins, something they cooked up for a fundraiser a few years before and a gallery in Corpus Christi.
The bottles sold out for $100 each and paid for many of the supplies that went to the artists in Sarajevo. Artists were invited over to Allison Studio at 1107 East Freeway, and included Virgil Grotfeldt, Benito Huerta, Jesus Morales, Joe Mancuso, and many others gathered in the afternoon early May 1994, and went to work on the 48 bottles of Yugoslav Cabernet Sauvignon to express how they felt about the war in Sarajevo. Joe Mancuso's "label" was an emersion of his bottle in his usual medium of concrete. "When the war ends we'll break it open and have a drink" Allison remembers Barnstone commenting "Cheap, just my flavor, and made in Sarajevo. Just like we planned it!"
However, the office filing boxes full of good wishes, supplies, and respect from their artists and brothers in arms from Texas were a deception. How so? I made some calls to a couple of contacts I had in Ljubljana to find out what was going on. George Soros's supplies were rotting on the docks, and I don't know what Susan Sontag did. I'm sure she probably raised a good bit of money and they could use it. We would do that too. But our money would be a drop in the bucket of course. What the artist wanted, what the artists who were playing their instruments, writing songs, singing choral pieces, constructing things from the broken material wanted materials to document and tell the outside world what was really going on.
This years 2025 TASTE bottles featuring smiles from our archive. Next year happy faces from this year's Photo Booth and what you send us. We're also asking artists this year to send us images. Please send us your images at least 10 days before awards show night.
They wanted to tell their own story and we were going to find a way for them to do it. So how to get the supplies in to document cameras batteries anything else they ask for through a series of checkpoints and I knew were coming? We would disguise our treasure at the bottom of the boxes wrapped in brown paper packets at the bottom of the boxes and covered with an assortment of feminine hygiene products. (Gertrude's idea) and yeah about halfway between Ljubljana and Sarajevo the deception did work and sometime I will tell everyone what it's like to watch Burley men look like they got bit by a snake, when they opened up the back of our 18-wheeler piggyback two cargo carrying a major load of communication equipment for Oslobedjena news services.
Pictured above a gift, and in the collection of Andrew & Annalee Durham.
A word about the significance of bottles & labels and this event
The idea only reappeared as something Allison would give his friends nine years after he closed gallery on Colquitt in 2016. 30 years after CAMH hosted the first ARM fundraiser, The first reappearance was for a long time friends Scott Hendler and Lulu Flores ( Hendler Flores Law, Austin TX) at a fundraiser they were having in Austin Texas. "It just got to be a fun thing to give a friend and by the way it was less expensive than flowers." Above are some examples of "Guaranteed Genuine Original Family Recipe, Celebrating Years of Happy Friends and Good Taste"
Of course, scan here with your smart phone for your table and chair reservations for the ARMON Awards Night