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Furnishings World Information Desk on
9/12/2022
Sophie Glenn, 2022 recipient of the John D. Mineck Fellowship, and her latest Regency-style chair, “Beautiful George”.
Boston’s Society of Arts + Crafts introduced that Sophie Glenn is the 2022 recipient of the John D. Mineck Fellowship, a high-profile award with an unrestricted $25,000 prize given yearly to an early-career furnishings artist.
A woodworker, sculptor, metalworker, and furnishings designer based mostly in Studying, Pennsylvania, Glenn stood out to Fellowship jurors as a gifted artist with a singular imaginative and prescient, a dedication to inventive progress, and a promising technical skill. Her choice, created from a nationwide pool of candidates, might be acknowledged October 6 with an award ceremony on the Boston Golf Membership in Hingham, Mass.
Glenn was born and raised in New York Metropolis, and attended the music, artwork and performing arts establishment LaGuardia Excessive Faculty earlier than incomes a Bachelor of Positive Arts diploma in Sculpture and Drawing from Buy School/State College of New York. She pursued a Grasp of Positive Arts in Furnishings Design and Woodworking at San Diego State College. “In faculty I pursued artwork and studied sculpture, however struggled to search out my voice,” Glenn says. “At SUNY, I used to be launched to furnishings maker Vivian Beer and all of it fell into place. I bear in mind welding for the primary time and it actually struck me – that is what I’ve to do.”
After finishing residencies at Tennessee’s Arrowmont Faculty of Crafts and Appalachian Middle for Craft – the place Glenn was the 2016-2019 Wooden Artist-In-Residence – she earned a full-time place as Visiting Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Mississippi State College.
Although she had developed a deep love for instructing, Glenn says time alone in her studio introduced her true enrichment and growth. She left academia in 2021 to give attention to her personal designs, drawing inspiration from antiques, outdated pictures and historic New England furnishings. Her deceptively fashionable items make the most of conventional designs reworked by progressive fabrication processes – with metal standing in for wooden. “I’ve at all times been fascinated with attempting to harmoniously mix wooden and metal in furnishings,” Glenn says, “however typically the 2 supplies would compete as a substitute of complement one another. In the end I eradicated wooden totally to create a sequence of traditional furnishings designs from rusted metal.”
“I deliberately rust my works,” she says, “it makes them look extra like antiques but additionally reveals off the fabric in a refined means.” Her fashion brings humor and a culturally savvy perspective to sure items, notably her latest Beautiful George (pictured, r). “This is without doubt one of the items I’m most happy with,” she says. “It’s a Regency-style chair; typically the backs of those chairs would have work of nude girls. I took a distinct spin on that concept…the picture of Seinfeld character George Costanza got here to thoughts, and I knew I had to make use of it.”
Glenn’s designs impressed Society of Arts + Crafts Trustee and Fellowship juror Miguel Gomez-Ibanez. “Sophie’s work attracted me at first once I thought I used to be wooden. After I realized it was metal as a substitute of wooden, I used to be impressed that It appeared so gentle, and confirmed an actual curiosity and understanding of conventional New England furnishings varieties,” Gomez-Ibanez stated. “Her work in metal is like no different I’ve seen. She has the technical skill and design sense to be a pacesetter within the subject.”
Glenn plans to make use of her Fellowship prize to finish development on an unbiased studio, and put money into store instruments and provides to encourage her inventive progress. Down the highway she needs to guide workshops, supply personal instruction, and mentor apprentices.
About The John D. Mineck Furnishings Fellowship
The John D. Mineck Furnishings Fellowship is without doubt one of the largest such prizes within the craft subject and one of many grants supported by the Boston-based John D. Mineck Basis, which honors pursuits Mineck pursued all through his life. The Fellowship focuses on rising furnishings makers whose work is up to date and practical, and helps younger artists with monetary help to develop their expertise and transfer them towards independence. The Society of Arts + Crafts, the place Mineck as soon as served as Board president, has administered the fellowship because it started in 2007.
Concerning the Society of Arts + Crafts
For greater than a century, the Society of Arts + Crafts has related artists with the communities that maintain them, and has been on the forefront of the American craft motion, fostering the event, gross sales, recognition, and schooling of superb craft. Its mission is to help and rejoice craft makers and their creativity; its imaginative and prescient is to construct and maintain a vibrant and numerous neighborhood and to form the way forward for craft. See the total mission right here.
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