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 proficient artist with a singular imaginative and prescient, a dedication to inventive progress, and a promising technical capacity. Her choice, made out of a nationwide pool of candidates, will likely 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 High-quality Arts diploma in Sculpture and Drawing from Buy School/State College of New York. She pursued a Grasp of High-quality Arts in Furnishings Design and Woodworking at San Diego State College. “In faculty I pursued artwork and studied sculpture, however struggled to seek 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.
Though she had developed a deep love for educating, Glenn says time alone in her studio introduced her true enrichment and growth. She left academia in 2021 to deal with her personal designs, drawing inspiration from antiques, previous images and historic New England furnishings. Her deceptively trendy items make the most of conventional designs reworked by revolutionary 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 usually the 2 supplies would compete as an alternative of complement one another. In the end I eradicated wooden fully to create a collection of traditional furnishings designs from rusted metal.”
“I deliberately rust my works,” she says, “it makes them look extra like antiques but additionally exhibits off the fabric in a delicate means.” Her fashion brings humor and a culturally savvy viewpoint to sure items, notably her latest Beautiful George (pictured, r). “This is without doubt one of the items I’m most pleased with,” she says. “It’s a Regency-style chair; typically the backs of those chairs would have work of nude girls. I took a unique 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 taking a look at wooden. Once I realized it was metal as an alternative of wooden, I used to be impressed that It appeared so mild, and confirmed an actual curiosity and understanding of conventional New England furnishings kinds,” Gomez-Ibanez stated. “Her work in metal is like no different I’ve seen. She has the technical capacity and design sense to be a frontrunner within the discipline.”
Glenn plans to make use of her Fellowship prize to finish building on an unbiased studio, and put money into store instruments and provides to encourage her inventive progress. Down the street she desires to steer workshops, provide 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 discipline 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 useful, 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.
In regards to the Society of Arts + Crafts
For greater than a century, the Society of Arts + Crafts has linked 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 high quality 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 various group and to form the way forward for craft. See the total mission right here.