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Judith Pointer Jia
and Mary Tortorici are each 2004
recipients of the prestigious Kentucky Arts Council Al Smith Fellowship Awards.
Jia is an Assistant Professor of Art and head of
the ceramics area at CentreCollege where she has taught since 1998.
Her beautiful sculptural forms are built with slab construction and are made of fine porcelain and
stoneware. Among her recent works are abstracted horse’s hooves and tall
tree trunk-like shapes. She covers her forms in a variety of subtly-colored
glazes. Jia earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of
Massachusetts at Dartmouth and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of
Kansas. Her work has been included in several national competitions.
Mary Tortorici, an Assistant Professor
of Art and Head of Photography at Eastern Kentucky University, has been a
photographer for more than 30 years. Her color photographs chronicle unusual
yards and scenes she discovers while traveling the back roads of Kentucky. She
received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Yale University School of
Art and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Massachusetts College of
Art. She has received numerous awards and grants for her photographs,
including a Ford Foundation Grant and a Film in the Cities/ McKnight Fellowship.
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Guy Mendes is one of the best-known
and well-respected photographers in the region. A suite of 13 of his portraits
of writers is in the collection of the Photographic Archives at the University
of Louisville, and the Cincinnati Art Museum and the University of Kentucky Art
Museum own his prints. Mendes’ work encompasses several interests. In addition
to landscape and portraiture, he loves to capture the unexpected, in both figures
and as found in odd signs and situations. Much of Mendes’ work has been widely
published in books and magazines and his prints are in many public and private
collections. Mendes has also won several Emmy Awards as a documentary writer,
director and producer for Kentucky Educational Television, where he has worked
since 1973.
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