click to enlarge Enosburg Falls artist
Sarah Amos has won the 2024
Vermont Prize. The award, presented for the best visual art currently being created in Vermont, carries a $5,000 prize.
Amos has been making mixed-media hybrid prints on both paper and fabric for 25 years and "continually challenges traditional notions of printmaking, both physically and intellectually," according to the statement announcing the award.
The prize was established
click to enlarge - Courtesy
- "1000 Wings" by Sarah Amos
in 2022 by the
Brattleboro Museum & Art Center;
Burlington City Arts; the
Current, a contemporary art center in Stowe; and the
Hall Art Foundation, which operates museums in Reading and in Derneburg, Germany. A representative of each organization and one guest juror — Phong H. Bui, an artist, curator, and cofounder and publisher of monthly journal the
Brooklyn Rail — selected Amos.
Her work, Bui said in a statement, "evokes a wonderful synthesis of form and matter ... Each work asserts its monumentality while maintaining a sense of intimacy, and calls forth particular places or experiences, while suggesting deep symbolic significance of sensation and memory.”
Amos earned a bachelor's
click to enlarge - Courtesy
- "Snow Bones" by Sarah Amos
degree in printmaking in her native Australia. She became a certified master printer at the Tamarind Institute in New Mexico and earned a master of fine arts degree from what was then
Northern Vermont University while working as master printer for
Vermont Studio Center Press. Amos has taught at Dartmouth, Williams and Bennington colleges.
“Using thread as a metaphorical web, I intertwine the realms of printing and drawing, aiming to create works that reflect meticulous attention to detail, materiality, and the passage of time," Amos wrote in her award application. Pattern plays a central role in her work, she said, citing inspiration from Persian carpets, the
Gee’s Bend quilt makers of Alabama, Japanese Kabuki theater, sashiko stitching and
Katsushika Hokusai’s prints.
Past Vermont Prize winners include
Will Kasso Condry of Brandon and
Terry Ekasala of East Burke.