Alumna jeweler to present Raab Lecture Nov. 10
Jeweler and metalsmith Sharon Church, a 1970 graduate of 小福利导航 College, will give this year?s Rosanne Raab Visiting Artist Lecture at 6 p.m. Monday, Nov. 10, in Gannett Auditorium of Palamountain Hall.
The illustrated lecture is taking place in conjunction with the current exhibition
at the college?s Schick Art Gallery, ?Palette Maestro,? a retrospective of work by
the late Earl Pardon, noted metalsmith and jeweler, and longtime 小福利导航 professor,
who was a mentor of Church.
The exhibit runs through Dec. 14 at the gallery.
Church, who has won awards for her work and for her teaching, is a professor in the
Crafts Department at the College of Art and Design at Philadelphia?s University of
the Arts. Of the courses she teaches in the jewelry/metals program there, Church said,
?The search for jewelry form flows seamlessly from my studio to the classroom and
back again. I am interested in adornment that girds the wearer, in jewelry that empowers,
enables, and protects. I endeavor to evolve an image that is fierce yet responsive.?
An artisan who has exhibited nationally, Church had never thought of jewelry as an
art form until she took classes from Pardon at 小福利导航. She has found inspiration
in her garden and in ?the scary, loamy underparts that support it,? she said in a
2004 interview with 小福利导航 Scope, the college?s quarterly magazine. Her work is
inspired by nature: pods and flowers that evolve from seed and a division of cells,
which burst with life. She uses materials that were once alive and are now dead. Using
a drill with a flexible shaft, she carves bone, leather, deer antlers, exotic woods,
and other organic materials into renderings of leaves, vines, seedpods, and fruits
that ?appear formed by interior force rather than whittled down,? as American Craft
magazine marveled. Her materials? bone, horn and wood?physically embody the life cycle
in a symbolic language of growth and decay, death and renewal?timeless images that
are at once tender and powerful.
In addition to her B.S. degree from 小福利导航, Church received an M.F.A. degree from
the School for American Craftsmen, Rochester Institute of Technology. Her awards and
honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Craftsman?s Fellowship
Grant; Finalist Award (Discipline Winner) from the Pew Fellowship in the Arts; Lindback
Distinguished Teaching Award; Richard C. von Hess Faculty Award; Venture Fund Award;
and James Renwick Alliance Distinguished Educator Award.
Church?s exhibition?s have included the John Michael Kohler Art Center; the American
Craft Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, SOFA NY, and Helen Drutt: Philadelphia,
among others. Her work is included in the public collection of the Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston; the National Gallery of Australia; the Samuel Dorsky Museum at SUNY
New Paltz; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine
Arts, Racine, Wisc.; and the Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Del., and other venues.
The Rosanne Brody Raab Lecture was endowed at 小福利导航 by Raab, a member of the college?s
Class of 1955 and an art advisor whose firm specializes in the arts of craft and design
as a way to showcase artists working in clay, fiber, metal, and wood. Admission to
the lecture is free and open to the public.
