The Kentucky Arts
Councils Kentucky Craft Marketing Program and the Kentucky Museum of Art and
Craft honored ceramic sculptor, potter, and teacher, Sarah Frederick of
Louisville, Kentucky with the Rude Osolnik
Award for 2007. The award honors its namesake, Rude Osolnik, the nationally
acclaimed wood turner from Berea, Kentucky, who devoted his life to the
development of his craft and teaching.
This prestigious award recognizes artists for their contributions to the
craft community, preservation of craft traditions through teaching and sharing,
and exemplary workmanship. Previous recipients are Wayne
Ferguson, Alma Lesch, Emily Wolfson, Arturo Alonzo Sandoval, Homer Ledford,
Joseph Molinaro, Stephen Rolfe Powell, Byron Temple (posthumously), Tim
Glotzbach, Lysbeth Wallace, and Marie Emlen
Hochstrasser.
Sarah Frederick earned
her bachelors degree in fine arts from Mills College, Oakland, California in 1957 where she studied with
noted ceramist, Antonio Prieto. She received training at the Massachusetts
College of Art in Boston; Haystack Mountain
School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine; and
Murray State University, Murray, Kentucky. She completed her masters degree in
ceramics from the University of Louisville in 1978, under the guidance of
Tom Marsh.
I grew up in
Louisville, Kentucky but as a young woman left for California to study art.
This changed my vision of how life might be lived. I came away in love with
ceramic arts, and the look and feel of California in the fifties. I have spent a
lifetime in clay, studying further in Maine,
Kentucky, New
York, and Canada. Most of the important events
in my life have centered around a relationship with clay. Landscape and organic
form are of primary inspiration. Clay, glaze and fire easily create the aspect
of both color and the pottery of many eras also figure in. My instincts as
storyteller have urged me to move aside from vessel making into ceramic
sculpture so that three-dimensional form expresses what I see and want to say,
said Sarah Frederick.
Sarah Frederick began
working as an independent potter in 1980 and was active in the beginning years
of the Kentucky Craft Marketing Program and Kentucky Crafted: The Market.
Early in her career, she moved into the national marketplace via the American
Craft Council and Rosen shows, and had an active craft business for sixteen
years. She has exhibited in, and sold to craft galleries all across the
country, including Bloomingdales in New York,
the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution, and at Neiman-Marcus in
San
Francisco. She has received numerous awards for her
ceramics, such as the Kentucky Arts Council's AI Smith Fellowship in 1992, and
was one of the featured artists in the books, Kentucky Crafts: Handmade and
Heartfelt, by Phyllis George (New York: Crown Publishers, 1989) and a
Pottery Tour of Kentucky, by Joe Molinaro (Lexington: Crystal Communications, 2000).
Sarahs Fredericks work is a part of several
prestigious art collections including the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft and
Ceramics Monthly magazine. Frederick continues to work in her retirement
as a studio artist and teacher.
The 2006 Rude Osolnik Award recipient, Wayne
Ferguson, wrote, Sarah has sought out teaching situations and workshops and
formed meaningful relationships on a personal and professional level that are
the cornerstone of a family of friends who just happen to have a common love,
clay. Sarah Frederick has done just that for over a quarter of a
century. She is a master potter and local and state treasure. If
there is a category for an exceptional role model in the crafts world...Sarah
Frederick should be at the top of the list.
The
Rude Osolnik Award dinner is held in conjunction with the annual Workshop
Weekend 2007, en titled, Re-Inventing Your Art and Craft Business for the
21st Century, at Spencerian
College, Lexington, Kentucky, June 1-2,
2007.
