Susan Cummins on Judging the Susan Beech Mid-Career Grant

The $20,000 Susan Beech Mid-Vocation Grant offers prestige, recognition, and funding to the winner.

The distinguished jurors for this grant cycle are AJF founder and collector Susan Cummins (US) curator and historian LaMar Gayles (US) and jewellery historian, curator, and writer Beatriz Chadour-Sampson (United kingdom). We will job interview them all, beginning with Cummins.

AJF: How ended up you launched to up to date jewelry?

Susan Cummins: I was released to American craft in the 1970s and opened a little store that largely featured ceramics designed by my associate, who was a potter. We did road fairs and marketed wholesale. Ultimately a gallery house came up for lease in Mill Valley, exactly where we had our studio and shop, so we bought that. I then started out showing a range of craft media, which include jewelry. I was incredibly impressed by the intelligence and skills of the jewelers and commenced to be really interested in it.

This yr proceeds to see a whole lot of disruption and uncertainty—epidemics, war, political unrest, and economic stressors—but we are also looking at massive adjustments to the strategies persons get the job done and interact. Do you anticipate to see distinct sorts of proposals provided the improvements we are encountering?

Susan Cummins: Certainly, I hope to see new and unforeseen means of approaching jewelry. Even jewellery-adjacent do the job would be intriguing to see.

What do you assume is the single most crucial conversation for artists to be possessing right now?

Susan Cummins: How to survive.

Moreover grants these as this just one, what other methods do you consider that artists can be encouraged and supported?

Susan Cummins: They will need to be educated in marketing and advertising talents and studying how to offer with production and distribution organizations. Finding out strategies to help on their own when continue to creating distinctive operate is really challenging. But there are lots of means to do that. The artists of the earlier really don’t definitely present street maps for this, so it would be aspect of their creative enhancement, too. Ceramic and fiber artists have entered the design and art markets. I believe that jewelers will have to do that, as well. The craft market of fairs and little galleries will not maintain them all about time.