ART JEWELRY FORUM NEWS RELEASE
Contact: Gail Hufjay (914-282-9822) or email info@artjewelryforum.org
Mill Valley, CA, February 5, 2009 —The Art Jewelry Forum (AJF) is accepting applications for its 2009 Emerging Artist Award. The amount of this year’s award is $5,000. This is the 9th year that AJF has awarded a contemporary jewelry artist a cash award.
The purpose of the award is to acknowledge promise, innovation, and individuality in the work of an emerging jewelry artist and to help to advance the artist’s career. The competition is open to makers of wearable art jewelry who: have completed their academic/professional training, have been out of school for one year or more, and have not had a solo artist exhibition in a commercial gallery or museum. Submitted work must have been unsupervised if from an academic setting.
Jurors for the 2009 competition are: Ursula Ilse-Neuman, jewelry curator at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Gail Hufjay, long-standing member of AJF and a collector of contemporary jewelry; and Masumi Kataoka, jewelry artist and recipient of the AJF’s 2008 Award.
Deadline for submission is June 14, 2009. More information about the award may be found on the AJF website. Applications may be submitted at www.callforentry.org.
The Art Jewelry Forum, founded in 1997, is a non-profit organization with the mission to advocate the field of contemporary art jewelry by promoting education, appreciation, and support for contemporary art jewelry. The award was established in 1999 and its first recipient, Yeon-Mi Keong, received the award at the 2000 Conference of the Society of North American Goldsmiths.
The winner of this year’s competition and $5,000 cash award will be announced at SOFA Chicago (International Exposition of Sculpture Objects and Functional Art), November 6-8, where the artist’s work will be exhibited at one of the AJF member galleries. The artist’s work will also be featured in the AJF ad for the SOFA catalogs, in Chicago and New York.
PHOTO: Masumi Kataoka, Brooch, sterling silver, gut and paint.
