Stephanie Scuris
American artist
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Stephanie Scuris (born 1931) is a Greek-American artist and arts educator known for her large-scale Constructivist sculptures. She taught at the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland.[2]
January 1, 1931
Stephanie Scuris | |
|---|---|
| Born | Stephanie Scuris January 1, 1931 Lacedaemonos, Greece |
| Education | Yale University, BFA, MFA |
| Known for | Sculpture |
| Notable work | Harmony Fountain, Singapore[1] |
| Movement | Bauhaus, Modernist, Constructivist, Geometric abstraction |
Early life
Scuris was born in Lacedaemonos, Greece,.[3] She moved to the United States in 1947 at age 16, two years after the end of World War II.[4] She studied under Josef Albers at Yale University, receiving a BFA and a MFA from the School of Art and Architecture in the late 1950s.[5]
Career
Scuris was one of the select group of students Albers introduced to Madeleine and Arthur Lejwa at the Galerie Chalette.[6] While still a student at Yale, she exhibited at their Structured Sculptures show of winter 1960.[7] She exhibited at the Whitney Museum of Art, MOMA, The Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Yale Art School, and worked on major commissions for the Bankers Trust Company[8] and the Salk Laboratories in the 1960s.[5]
In 1962 she was part of a major exhibition at Mt. Holyoke College, in conjunction with the school's 125th anniversary, celebrating the "coming of age" on women's art, in America, as a creative force.[9] Other exhibitors included Lee Bontecou, Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Nevelson, Georgia O-Keefe, and numerous others.
She was recruited, along with Norman Carlberg, by the educator and artist Eugene Leake (both alumni of the Yale/Albers MFA program), to revive the sculpture program at the Rinehart School at the Maryland Institute of Art. That revival was, by Scuris's account, "all about Bauhaus,”[10] an educational approach that centered on knowledge of the physical manipulation of materials rather than strict figurative representation.
Later years
Scuris spent her latter years in a combined studio-apartment in renovated warehouse in the historic neighborhood of Fells Point, in Baltimore Maryland, in the company of her brother, Theodore Scuris, also an artist. When asked by a local interviewer why she had never married, she answered, ‘I had my art, I couldn’t do both.’[6]
Selected exhibitions
Source:[11]
- New Haven Art Festival, 1958–59
- Art: USA, traveling exhibition, in 1958 through 1960[6]
- Recent Sculpture USA, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1959
- Structured Sculpture, Galerie Chalette, New York, 1961 & 1968
- Geometric Abstraction in America, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1962
- Women Artists in America Today, Mt. Holyoke College, MA, 1962
- White on White, DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA, 1965
- Inside Outside, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA, 1966
- Josef Albers: His Art & Influence, Montclair Art Museum, NJ, 1981
Awards, permanent collections
- Winterwitz Award
- Yale University, prize for outstanding work & alumni award
- Peabody Award, 1961–62;
- Rinehart fellowship, 1961-64.[3]
- Skedion Ecton, (1964) Whitney Museum of American Art, New York[12]