Artist Sarah Amos Wins 2024 Vermont Prize

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 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 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.