A quilt sewn together with used tea bags, chess pieces made from confiscated airport security items, a bowl of felt peas, a wall of crocheted bricks.
These are some of the 70 works in "Materials: Hard and Soft," the Greater Denton Arts Council's exhibit of contemporary American crafts.
Visitors to the Center for the Visual Arts' Meadows Gallery may not immediately recognize they are stepping into a nationally renowned, blind-juried exhibition, now in its 24th year.
"We don't realize the stature and the prestige that it has across the country because it's ours," said Margaret Chalfant, executive director of the Greater Denton Arts Council. "We're used to it."
This year, 126 artists from 33 states submitted 340 entries for the show.
Included in "Materials: Hard & Soft" are works made from clay, fiber, glass, metal, paper, wood or any combination thereof. Every year, the juror is given $5,000 from the Greater Denton Arts Council to distribute among the artists as he or she wishes. This year, three $1,000 juror awards and five $400 honorable mentions were given.
University of North Texas graduate art student Calina Shevlin was another winner of the $1,000 juror award.
"I have entered 'Materials: Hard and Soft' every year since 2005, and this is the first time a piece has been accepted into this particular show," she said.
Shevlin's work, CB Mtns, is a three-dimensional rendering of a topological map of the Camelback Mountains near Phoenix, where she lived on and off for many years. She said she has "fond memories of hiking and living in these mountains."
Shevlin said maps have always inspired her for their detail and colors that are "neither true to the landscape nor the imagination. They are so often ephemeral in both meaning and form," she said.
"Maps were literal interpretations of the places I had inhabited," she said. At first she created hand-painted maps in enamel, and later she created brooches.
"Considering the topography of the flat landscapes that I had been depicting, I began to think about how to add this dimensionality to my work, while still incorporating place, maps and personal identity. The next series I embarked upon would be a three-dimensional rendering of a two-dimensional depiction of a three-dimensional area, made to scale." CB Mtns is an example of this.
The other juror award was given to Peggy Wiedemann, from Huntington Beach, Calif., for Over-and-Out, a fiber piece made from pine needles and Irish waxed linen.
The five honorable mentions were awarded to:
• Dona Anderson, of Seattle, for Maze, created from reed and paper;
• Critz Campbell, a professor at Mississippi State University, for Bell Weather, made from jatoba and maple wood;
• Sherri Woodard Coffey, of Fort Worth, for Purple Haze, a hand-dyed wool tapestry;
• Dan Krueger, of Downers Grove, Ill., for Engine Block, made of sterling silver and felted wool, and Pig Roaster, made from sterling silver and found objects; and
• Nick Mullins, from Champaign, Ill., who submitted three wooden brooches.
