Master printmaker Sarah Amos of Enosburg Falls has been selected as the third annual recipient of The Vermont Prize, which celebrates and supports the best visual art being made in the state today.
The award, which carries a $5,000 cash prize, is sponsored by four of Vermont’s leading contemporary arts organizations: the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, Burlington City Arts, The Current and the Hall Art Foundation.
Amos, originally from Australia, has been making mixed-media hybrid prints on both paper and fabric for over 25 years. Her large-scale stitched works depict organic figures and totemic forms. They serve as canvases for fantastical aesthetic exploration, allegorical commentary and charades.
“I find that her pictorial strength, infused with the inventive application of material, evokes a wonderful synthesis of form and matter,” said Phong H. Bui, co-founder and publisher of The Brooklyn Rail and one of five jurors of the competition. “Her abstractions deploy post-Cubist collage with originality of thought and materiality. 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 of Fine Arts in printmaking from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia. She then emigrated to the United States to attend the Tamarind Institute of Lithography in New Mexico, where she became a certified Tamarind Institute master printer. She later received an M.F.A. from Northern Vermont University (now Vermont State University) while working as the master printer for the Vermont Studio Center Press.
Amos has taught at Dartmouth College, Williams College and Bennington College. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad.