Lynchburg, VA, USA—Art Jewelry Forum (AJF) is pleased to announce this grant opportunity for artists of any age and nationality. Established by jewelry collector Linda Peshkin, who lives in Scottsdale, AZ, US, this $20,000 grant has as its objective to support the creation of a solo exhibition to advance an artist working in the field of art jewelry.
The jury of distinguished professionals for this grant cycle will be: Caroline Broadhead (UK), Mike Holmes (US), and Grace Lai (New Zealand/Aotearoa).
- Caroline Broadhead explores objects that come into contact with and interact with the body in her practice. Although jewelry is a consistent thread, the work has also developed into larger-scale work that explores the outer extents of the body as seen through light, shadows, reflections, and movement. It has included installation and performance and collaborative work. She lectures, teaches, and exhibits widely, and her work is represented in public collections across the world. Broadhead received the Herbert Hofmann Prize in 2022. She is professor emeritus at Central Saint Martins London, from which she retired as course leader, BA Jewellery Design.
- Mike Holmes is the owner of Velvet da Vinci Gallery, established in 1991 in San Francisco, CA. He has curated 100+ exhibitions of contemporary jewelry and craft-based sculpture, including one-person shows, materials-based shows, and thematic and political ones such as the AntiWar Medals touring exhibition responding to the Iraq War and La Frontera, which looked at issues surrounding the US/Mexico border. Holmes has given talks about contemporary jewelry internationally and written articles about craft for the Museum of Arts and Design, Art Jewelry Forum, and Surface Design Journal.
- Grace Lai is an art historian and curator interested in uncovering stories held by objects overlooked or dismissed by history. Positioning material culture as a decoder of the immaterial, her research seeks to untangle the complex web of connections, histories, and social structures inherited by objects in the hopes of addressing issues relevant to museum collections and societies today. Currently, Lai is the Curator of Applied Arts & Design at Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum, where she leads the exhibition, development, and research of a nationally significant archive of craft from Aotearoa New Zealand and abroad.
The AJF Solo Exhibition Award is open to all makers. The proposed project should be about jewelry, loosely defined. The grant recipient will receive an award in the amount of $20,000, to be paid over the two years in which the project will be implemented.
Applications will be accepted starting November 11, 2024. The deadline to apply is 11:59 PM, MST, on Sunday, January 12, 2025. More information and complete guidelines can be found here.
Contact: Marta Costa Reis
Email: ajfartistaward@artjewelryforum.org
About AJF
Art Jewelry Forum is a nonprofit organization spreading awareness and increasing appreciation of art jewelry worldwide since 1997. AJF advocates for art jewelry through an ambitious agenda of education, conversation, and financial support. It commissions critical writing that sets the standard for excellence in the field and publishes artjewelryforum.org, an online resource for original content on art jewelry.
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