In collaboration with the University of Delaware, the 2023 Lynn Herrick Sharp Award Exhibition features the work of three art majors in the final stages of pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in the Department of Art and Design. During the student’s junior year, portfolios are submitted to the fine art faculty. The faculty then selects one award winner and two honorable mentions to formally exhibit their work and receive a financial award. 

Established in September 2009, the Lynn Herrick Sharp Award supports the University of Delaware’s Fine Arts program in the Department of Art and Design. Lynn Herrick Sharp is a long-time supporter of The Delaware Contemporary, having served as Secretary of the Board of Directors from 2002 to 2008. She is recognized as an Emeritus Board Member for her contributions to The Delaware Contemporary and for championing art in the region.

ARTISTS:

Leah Colaizzi: Lynn Herrick Sharp Award Winner
Colaizzi is a Pittsburgh-based illustrator and painter who finds comfort in color. Through floral pinks, indigo blues, and bright accents, she is able to manifest thought into tangible forms. In her illustrations, prints, and paintings, Colaizzi explores the psyche, illustrating the soul and conscious and unconscious workings of the mind through her own system of mark making, line work, and color symbolism. Just as the spirit is non-concrete, Colaizzi’s work leans into the world of the whimsical. It is not grounded by reality, rules, or propriety. Colaizzi’s curiosity and experimental methods of working drive her explosive, yet refined, compositions in an attempt to describe and make visible what cannot be seen by the naked eye. 

Kyrin Davis: Honorable Mention
Davis is an audio-visual artist who uses motion and sound to vivify his paintings, sculptures, and videos. Davis creates rhythmic visual work in response to his authored and designed musical scores using a keen ear to musical timbres and an attempt to capture the tone, color, and quality of sound. While his prints and sculptures often explore somber subject matter, his paintings, animations, and videos depict lightness through the materialization of sound. His studies in spiritual and philosophical belief systems, including the teachings of the Buddha and Tibetan Buddhism, shape his methodology; his process is somewhat meditative as he intuitively responds to actions that cause a desired effect on his materials. This way of working opens Davis to the unpredictable, often joyous flow of making, and leads to a deeper understanding of the human soul. 

Vergil Perry: Honorable Mention
Perry is a Delaware-based freelance photographer and videographer who uses his camera to probe for the true feelings of his subjects in everyday situations. Photographing people close to him, Perry creatively documents musicians, artists, strangers, neighbors, and skateboarders in their environments. His use of long exposure, low key lighting, and high contrast conveys the angst and apprehension of twenty-somethings who are coming of age during social and political change in the United States. After living through a pandemic and volatile elections, Perry has a foreboding of his generation's future where it will be harder to find truth amongst the landscape of lies. A versatile photographer, influenced by street photography, Perry captures the rawness of ordinary life in candid moody moments and carefully constructed portraits.

Constance S. & Robert J. Hennessy Project Space