Sharon Church
2008 Craft Educator Award
Sharon Church, a jeweler and metalsmith, is also a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She makes adornments which gird the wearers and that portray images that are fierce yet responsive. She seeks to develop forms that embody a symbolic language of growth and decay, death and renewal - timeless images that are at once tender and powerful. The work, which she does privately in the studio, validates and gives credibility to her position as a teacher.
Her teaching requires a more public persona. Teaching and making art, both are skill based and concept driven. Church has learned that both require an intuitive response to each new problem, and both are filled with discovery and surprise. In the studio and the classroom, new challenges continually emerge. Church remains open to change, embraces new opportunities, experiments, takes risks and continues the artistic development of her students and her own work.
Church graduated from Skidmore College and has a M.F.A. from the School for American Craftsmen at Rochester Institute of Technology. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pew Fellowship in the Arts. At the University of the Arts, she has received the Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award and the Hess Faculty Award.
Her work has been exhibited at the John Michael Kohler Art Center, the American Craft Museum, The Philadelphia Mum of Art, and the Helen Drutt Gallery in Philadelphia. She is represented in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Samuel Dorsky Museum, New Paltz, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Racine Art Museum; and Delaware Art Museum.