News + Events

06/12/2013

Two exceptionally talented and dedicated faculty members have been recognized with RISD’s 2013 Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching, an annual award presented at Commencement. Both are also RISD alumni: Jocelyne PrinceMFA 94 GL, an assistant professor of Glass who also served as Interim Graduate Program Director during the 2012–13 academic year, and Fred Lynch 86 IL, a senior critic in the Illustration department. Winners of the award – named after the late professor and former RISD President John R. Frazier 12 PT, who served from 1955-62 – are selected each year by students and faculty peers who are prior recipients themselves.

Students describe Jocelyne Prince as “a big-picture thinker with an infectiously positive attitude.” They have flocked to her intellectually challenging and experimental glass studios since she began teaching at RISD in 2001 in hopes of absorbing some of her deep knowledge of materials, techniques and general knowledge of glass.

Prince is fascinated by the idea of glass as a transparent material in which an artist can “suspend the thought process.” Her work also plays with the conflicting notions of glass as an objective scientific tool used in fabricating lenses and a subjective craft that reflects the artist’s imagination and vision. She recently showed her work at Spin Event at Vrij Glas in Amsterdam, Me and Them at Kenderdine Art Gallery, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, and On Going Invention at the Fullerton Museum at Cal State University, San Bernardino.

Prince has also just won a $30,000 sculpture fellowship from the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation to fund her project The Library: Part II. The foundation was established in 1952 to further the personal development of promising artists at the crucial middle stages of their careers. Prince’s original Library installation encompasses more than 1,000 glass panels that have been marked or scarred in some way – for example by applying stress, water, heat or sound.

Fellow Frazier winner Fred Lynch has taught Illustration at RISD for 24 years and is universally admired for what students describe as his “insightful, engaging and entertaining” approach. An accomplished illustrator who has earned wide recognition in his field, he is both a witty storyteller and a respectful, “ridiculously helpful” mentor who provides challenging assignments and honest and empathetic criticism.

Lynch has won recognition from The Society of Illustrators, American Illustration, Communication Arts Magazine, Print Magazine, American Artists Magazine and The Norman Rockwell Museum. He also chairs the Illustration department at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, MA, where he received the Carlos Dorrian Award for Teaching Excellence. Each July, he heads up Montserrat’s Journalistic Drawing program in Central Italy, where students create a series of images that captures their experience of Italian life and culture. Lynch’s own drawings of the region were published last year in a book entitled Drawing Viterbo: Sketches from a Medieval City.

–Simone Solondz