Can someone give me an idea of a place where I can find a good and reliable artist for a project? This is a 'for pay' contract job, but I have no idea where I can go to find quality artists and what is the best way to deal with contract artists.

Well if the gig isn't too demanding, I'd be willing to lend a hand.

What kind of art are you looking for? Pixel sprites are abundant at pixelation.

For the 2D artwork I'm looking for 'top down isometric' style artwork (i.e. top down rendered at an angle) and put into nice 16x16 or 32x32 tiles. The genre is a war game so I'm looking for the usual soldiers, tanks, helos, buildings, troop transports, and the like. Many of these objects would have several (2-6) frames of animation.

Try the World Creator v1.5 FREE software.
It deals with Isometric, 2D, Pseudo3D, Animations, Tiling etc for games creation.
You could easily create your own artwork from this software.
They have also just released the World Creator v2.0.

Here's the Link to the World Creator and Inet Software
www.inet2inet.com

Regards
Activ8