2020 Whitewater Valley Art Competition

Live Jurying

Live Awards Program

Awarded artwork

Kevin Harris

Kevin Harris teaches at Sinclair Community College where he has led courses in Drawing, Printmaking and Digital Media since the year 2000. Prior to coming to Sinclair, Kevin held teaching appointments at the University of Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky University, the Art Academy of Cincinnati, The University of the Arts, Moore College of Art and Design and Lincoln University.

Kevin earned a BA from Hampton University and an MFA from the University of Cincinnati. He has also studied at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and frequently attends printmaking workshops at Making Art Safely in New Mexico. His work is included in the collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum as well as in many corporate and private collections. He has recently been featured in solo exhibitions at the Dana L. Wiley Gallery, Dayton, OH and at the African American Visual Arts Guild (AAVAG) Gallery at Central State University-West and at Sinclair’s Triangle Gallery where he presented, MULTIPLY, an exhibition of four thematically intertwined bodies of work: MULTIPLY, Angels Tread, Dream Sequence and Urban Wordfare plus The Sticker Snatcher Books.

Sarojini Johnson

Sarojini Jha Johnson has taught printmaking and foundations at Ball State University since 1985. She grew up in Ohio and earned undergraduate degrees in French and drawing from the University of Cincinnati. She received an MFA in printmaking from Miami University where she began working with animal and plant forms in her prints. As a graduate student in 1983, her work was accepted into the 5th Annual Whitewater Valley Art Competition. IU East is thrilled to welcome Professor Johnson back 37 years later, this time as a juror.

Her work places natural forms in a fictional context. Her main medium is color intaglio printmaking, a medium that allows for great creativity and invention in terms of surface and color. She has been exploring memories and impressions of India, her country of origin. Animal images such as fish and birds still emerge in this work. Sarojini also makes artist’s books that present issues such as the effects of climate change on flora and fauna.

Jae Won Lee

Jae Won Lee received a Bachelor of Fine Art degree in sculpture from California State University, Long Beach and a Master of Fine Art in ceramics from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. Lee is currently Professor at Michigan State University and other institutes she taught include Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Camberwell College of Arts in London, the UK, and Chung Nam National University, Deajeon, Korea, California State University, Long Beach, and the University of Washington, Seattle.

Lee makes intimate-scaled, reductive, sealed porcelain box forms, as well as porcelain sculpture shaped by numerous small multiple components of nuanced whites and off-whites and assembled into a large singular unit toward conveying the idea of white winter as a place to contemplate simplicity, silence, and solitude. Recently she has been exploring and applying this theme on works on paper and mixed media. She has exhibited in numerous national and international exhibitions. Recent solo exhibitions include: Tag Ends, Lim Lip Museum of Art, Gongju, Korea, Jae Won Lee In Situ, Blanche with In Situ Galerie, Nyon, Switzerland, and Myosotis, Gallery Lee & Bae, Busan, Korea.

42nd WVAC Award Winners

2020 Whitewater Competition Awards

1st Place: Barbara Triscari - La Chiesa di Bolzano Vicentino - Fiber art: quilt 24.45" x 27.45" 2014
2nd Place: Chris Itsell - The Fabric of Mortality - Stainless Steel and Burl Wood 36" x 17" x 8" 2020
3rd Place: Al Harden - Inquisition - Digital Photography 24" x 20" 2018
Honorable Mentions: Matthew Schellenberg - Her Beauty Gained Her Everything She Had Ever Dreamt of. . . - Cherry, Black Walnut, Ash, Cyprus, Goncalvo Alves, Steel 85" x 31" x 58" 2020; Danielle Rante - Tapestry - Cyanotype and colored pencil on paper 76" x 72" 2020; Austin Delano - Factory to Table Fresh - Wood (poplar,maple), paint 19" x 9" x 20" 2020; Kathy Moore - Looking Down Upon Corner of Table Top - Graphite pencil on Rives printmaking paper 39" x 39" 2019; Yingqi Zhao - Mom - Copper, brass, fine silver, vitreous enamel, stainless steel 5" x 11" x 4" 2019
Chancellor’s Purchase Award: Shelby Alexander - Not Your Ingénue - Mixed media (graphite on paper, secondhand textiles) 26" x 20" x 3" 2020