Winner of the 7th Annual Borowsky Prize Announced

An international panel of glass experts has awarded University of the Arts’ seventh annual Irvin Borowsky International Prize in Glass Arts to glass artist and educator Simone Fezer. The Borowsky Prize is given each year to an artist whose work is conceptually daring, exemplifies technical skill and innovation, and advances the field of contemporary glass. The prize carries with it a $5,000 award and a lecture at UArts. Fezer will visit the university in November.  

“I am overwhelmed and feel deeply honored to be receiving this prestigious prize, especially since it was granted to me by a jury of artists and scholars whose work I have long admired,” Fezer says. “I hope to finally meet some of them in person and very much look forward to coming to Philadelphia in November.”

The jury included Daniel Clayman, the Effron Family Endowed Chair in Glass Studies at UArts; Brian Effron, glass collector and UArts trustee; Nate Watson, executive director of Public Glass in San Francisco; Diane Wright, curator of glass at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio; and numerous others. 

Fezer teaches sculptural glass at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, Germany, and exhibits her mostly large-scale installations in glass and mixed media nationally and internationally. 

The prize also includes honorable mentions; this year, those honorees were Jes Fan and Kim KototamaLune. 

The Borowsky Prize is made possible through a generous gift from the late University of the Arts Trustee Irvin J. Borowsky and his wife, Laurie Wagman, who is a prize juror and a current trustee.

Pictured above: Simone Fezer, “stranded/surging,”​​​​​​​ 2018, 400 x 600 x 600 cm, mold-blown, found and mirrored glass, mirrors, steel, space-blankets, cardboard, wood, glass-fibers, mixed media
photo credit: Gottfried Stoppel