Call for Entries for the 2011 Lydon Emerging Artist Program (LEAP) Award. Established in the fall of 2007, the LEAP Award provides early career artists who show exceptional promise the opportunity to showcase a body of their work to regional, national, and international audiences. The winner of this juried award receives a $1,000 cash prize to develop a line of work to be shown exclusively through the Store at the Society for Contemporary Craft (SCC).
The guest juror for the 2011 competition is Sharon Massey. An internationally recognized jeweler, Massey received a BFA from Winthrop University in 1999, and an MFA in Metal Design from East Carolina University in 2006. She received the Art Jewelry Forum Emerging Artist Award in 2009 and was recently chosen to participate in Lucca Preziosa Young, an exhibition of eight jewelers under 35, which was exhibited in Lucca, Italy, Munich, Germany, and at the JOYA Festival of Contemporary Jewellery in Barcelona, Spain. Her work is included in the collections of the Racine Art Museum, Wisconsin, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England. In the early 1970s, SCC’s founder, Pittsburgh arts patron Elizabeth Rockwell Raphael recognized that artists working in craft media were exploring new directions in contemporary art, and she opened The Store for Arts and Crafts and People-Made Things in Verona, Pennsylvania. Known locally as The Store, Raphael sold artwork by young and emerging craft artists such as Wendell Castle, Lenore Tawney, Josh Simpson, Howard Kottler, and Robert Lee Morris among many others that needed wider opportunities to exhibit and sell their work. Building on this early history, it is our hope that the LEAP Award will facilitate young artists move into a career in contemporary craft.A printable prospectus is available at their website. For more information, email [email protected] or call 412.261.7003 x16.
