Noted sculptor and Scripps College alumna Elizabeth Turk, winner of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship for 2010, will be the Scripps College commencement speaker on Sunday, May 15, 2011, at 10 a.m., on Elm Tree Lawn, on the Scripps College campus.
As an artist, Turk is best known for creating a series of 16 exquisitely carved marble sculptures, “The Collars.” Elizabethan ruffs, delicate patterns of lace, as well as natural and corporal imagery—from spider webs to the human skeletal system—were the inspiration for the collars, each sculpted from a 400-pound block of Sivec or Carrara marble. Two of the collars in the series were Turk’s responses to the events of 9/11 and demonstrate “the fragility of life manifested in the hardness and stability of the marble.”
Turk is one of 22 Americans to receive the MacArthur Fellowship for 2010. The fellowship, often called “Genius Award,” is given by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to exceptionally creative individuals as “an investment in a person’s originality, insight, and potential.” The award comes with a $500,000 no-strings attached grant to “offer unprecedented freedom and opportunity to reflect, create, and explore.”
Turk has received several additional awards and recognitions, including the New York City Art Commission Award for Excellence in Design and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, both in 2000; she was awarded the 2010 Barnett & Annalee Newman Foundation Fellowship in 2010. She exhibited a selection of her work at the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery at Scripps College in 2003.
After receiving her BA in international relations from Scripps College in 1983, Turk pursued a master’s in fine arts from Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute in Baltimore. A Pasadena, California, native, she is currently working on a new series inspired by water.