The Maine Crafts Association announces the MCA 2017 Master Craft Artist Award Recipient: Anna Hepler
Join the celebration at an Awards Presentation and Reception for Anna Hepler on Sunday, August 13 from 4-5:30pm at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, 543 Shore Road, Ogunquit, ME. The award will be presented at 4:30.
The Maine Crafts Association (MCA), a statewide non-profit organization promoting the work of Maine’s craft artists, has named artist Anna Hepler of Eastport, Maine as the 2017 recipient of the MCA Master Craft Artist Award. Recipients are selected for demonstrating excellence in craftsmanship, inspired design, a singular voice or style, and a career of service to the field.
The 2017 MCA Master Craft Award process began with nominations submitted from past award recipients. The 2017 recipient was researched and selected by Nat May, director of Hewnoaks Artist Colony.
Nat May writes, “Anna Hepler explores form, purpose and design through experimentations with an incredibly diverse range of material. She has a unique way of using intuition and experience to guide her work, engaging in series of improvisations that allow the material itself to have collaborative agency. Hepler’s embracing of uncertainty demonstrates an openness to evolution, as she continually builds upon her expertise with new learning and understanding of what a given material will abide or even prefer.”
2013 Master Craft Artist Awardee Lynn Duryea adds, “Hepler’s work occupies an intriguing intersection of materials, concepts and processes. Her compelling and enigmatic pieces are evidence of the possibilities inherent in the investigation of these elements. Construction and craftsmanship are essential aspects of the work, employed to explore and support her ideas. Moving between flat and form, Hepler creates images that suggest myriad possibilities. Rather than represent or replicate, they urge us to ponder and wonder.”
Renowned for her work as a printmaker and sculptor, Hepler is an innovator across many mediums, including print, clay, wire, plastic and wood. She possesses a boundless curiosity about what can happen when working and reworking a compelling form. Hepler has held visiting artist lectureships throughout the US, and faculty appointments at Whitman College (WA), MECA, Deep Springs College (CA), Vermont College, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and Bowdoin College, where she was a visiting assistant professor from 2003 until 2009, after which she established her present studio in Eastport, ME. She is a United States Artists 2016 Barr Fellow, and has been awarded numerous commissions, residencies and fellowships including the Individual Artist Fellowship from the Maine Arts Commission, a year-long residency from the Roswell Artist in Residence program, and most recently, a residency at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, NS. Hepler’s work is in international public collections including the National Gallery of Art, Tate Gallery (London), the Library of Congress, the Portland Museum of Art, and college and university museums of Maine – Colby College Musuem of Art, University of Maine Museum of Art, and Bowdoin College Museum of Art. For further reading and images of Anna Hepler’s work, visit annahepler.com.
In the tradition of the Master Craft Artist Award, Anna Hepler will teach at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle ME for MCA Workshop Weekend, May 10-13, 2018. Information and registration will be published at mainecrafts.org in the fall of 2017.
The public, supporters, friends and family of Anna Hepler are invited to join the celebration at an Awards Presentation and Reception for Anna Hepler on Sunday, August 13 from 4-5:30pm at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, 543 Shore Road, Ogunquit, ME.