The Kansas Arts Commission has announced its 2011 Governor’s Arts Awards recipients, which includes two winners from Lawrence.

This year’s honorees are Arkansas City Area Arts Council (arts organization); Louis Copt, Lawrence (artist); Willa Griswold, Marysville (arts advocate); Martha E. “Betty” Muncy, Dodge City (arts patron); and Linda Reimond, Lawrence (arts-in-education). In addition, Sara Paretsky, a best-selling author and native Kansan, will be honored with this year’s Distinguished Arts Award.

Copt is a landscape painter, teacher, and community volunteer. He is an active exhibitor of his work nationwide and serves as a painting instructor at the Lawrence Arts Center. Copt is known primarily for his paintings of the Flint Hills and prairie fires, but he is also well versed in figurative and still-life traditions. While his work is representational, his style is elemental and rooted in abstract composition. He is also active as an arts advocate and educator, mentoring students within a community education environment and taking the initiative to facilitate exhibitions of his students work throughout the area and the United States.

Reimond is the director of the first arts-based preschool in the Midwest and one of the first such programs in the nation. Located at the Lawrence Arts Center, the preschool has pioneered the development of arts-based early childhood curriculum, and Reimond is a leader in the training of teachers on the use of art in classrooms for young children. Teaching in the preschool for over 25 years, she maintains a consistent presence in the preschool classrooms, where she continues to develop innovative ideas to engage early learners in the arts.