The national 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship was awarded to Long Beach City College (LBCC) professor, Coleen Sterritt for her achievement in the field of Fine Arts, officials announced.
Sterritt, who is the Sculpture Program Coordinator at LBCC, was recognized for her work as a sculptor as well as her promise in future accomplishment.
“We are extremely proud to have one of our talented faculty members recognized with this tremendous honor,” LBCC Superintendent-President Eloy Ortiz Oakley said in a statement. “We congratulate Coleen on this achievement, which will serve as an inspiration to our students and faculty.”
Guggenheim Fellowships are grants awarded to selected individuals to grant them blocks of time in which they can work with unlimited creative freedom for a minimum of six to 12 months. Grants are made freely and Fellows may spend them in any manner they deem necessary to their work.
During Sterritt’s Fellowship, that begins later this year, she will explore a new sculpting process called “direct burnout casting.”
On April 5, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded 175 fellowships, with three of them being joint fellowships, to 178 scholars, artists and scientists. They were chosen based on the recommendations of distinguished practitioners in the competition fields.
Candidates were selected from a pool of nearly 3,000 in the U.S. and Canada. Sterritt was one of 23 recipients who was awarded in Fine Arts.
“To be honored for your prior achievement and future promise by your peers is a major accomplishment,” Sterritt said in a statement. “I am absolutely thrilled and very honored to be that my work has been noted by this award.”
Sterritt has been sculpting for nearly 40 years. She joined LBCC in 1996 and became faculty coordinator of the sculpture program in 1998.
Her sculptures and drawings have been displayed in exhibits all through the U.S. and Europe, in addition to being in both public and private collections, according to a press release.
“It’s our belief in the visual and media arts department that to be an effective educator of studio art that we need to be practicing artists, and that [experience] goes directly into the classroom,” Sterritt said in a statement.
Previously, Sterritt received fellowships from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the National Endowment for the Arts, the J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts and Art Matters Inc., in New York.
Photo courtesy of Long Beach City College.