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Sharon Church   1948 - 2022

  .\  Sharon's hands photographed for her exhibition Queen Bee at the gallery in 2017.  Photo by Ken Yanoviak 

 


Sharon Church’s creative process is a sensory leap of faith. She navigates between the rigorous precision of her craft and the desire to pursue an open inquiry, believing in art’s power to seduce, to approach the sublime. Manifest is her devoted embrace of beauty – its power and capacity to embody the human spirit.   Myra Mimlitsch-Gray, 2018.

 

 

SHARON CHURCH (1948 – 2022) was a studio jeweler and Professor Emerita, Craft + Material Studies, School of Art, The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She received her B.S. from Skidmore College in 1970 and earned her M.F.A. at The School for American Craftsmen at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1973. Her work has been in exhibitions across the globe, and her influence on contemporary jewelry is pervasive and persistent.

 

'I really believe craft has within it the key to valuing a human life,” she says. “To make something with your hands, to know that you exist, to see that that existence has value – even for someone who just likes doing it, it has enormous value.”

 

A Master of American Craft (American Craft Council designation, 2015), Sharon was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Craftsman’s Fellowship Grant and was twice selected for a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. She received the Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award, the Richard C. von Hess Faculty Award, and multiple Venture Fund Awards from The University of the Arts. The Smithsonian’s James Renwick Alliance’s 2018 Distinguished Artist, she also received their Distinguished Educator Award in 2008. In 2018 Sharon received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of North American Goldsmiths.

 

Her work is in the permanent collections of Yale University, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Arts and Design; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany; The National Gallery of Australia; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Nationalmuseum of Sweden, Stockholm; The Museum of Fine Arts Houston; the Delaware Art Museum; The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2022 the Smithsonian American Art Museum acquired and included her work in the Renwick Gallery’s 50th Anniversary Exhibition.

 

She is considered one of the United States’ greatest treasures of contemporary jewelry.

 

 

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