MassArt Award Recipients

June 13, 2017 by alice.stanne

With the close of the spring semester comes portfolio reviews, graduation, and the excitement of seniors moving on into the professional world. Another exciting end of the year milestone is the awarding of MassArt institutional awards. Students from all across the school apply for a variety of awards; there are two travel awards, a senior project award, and a new prize for creativity and innovation. A committee of faculty and staff review the proposals to select the recipients that have the most well thought out project that shows outstanding artist merit. Out of those four awards, two Illustration seniors were selected to receive recognition.

Caitlin Mavilia, a double major in Illustration and Sculpture, was awarded the Donis A. Dondis Travel Award for her project Rediscovering the Trojan Horse. The $5,000 Dondis Travel Award is granted to a Junior or Senior to help defray the cost of travel for the purpose of completing a well-defined project having artistic merit.Caitlin Mavilia will be shedding new light on the history of a 3,000 year old narrative as a part of a current project designed by Handshouse Studio to bring the Trojan Horse back to life. The Handshouse Studio run by MassArt professors Rick and Laura Brown is an educational organization that replicates historic objects as student-driven projects. Their current project to reconstruct the first ever, period-accurate Trojan Horse at full scale will be installed in The International Spy Museum’s new building in Washington D.C. In pursuit to further investigate the thinking behind the Mycenaeans, the makers of the Trojan Horse, Caitlin will be traveling to Greece to develop a series of large scale drawings informed by Mycenaean depictions of horses. Caitlin will also be developing an illustrated book on the story of the Trojan horse that includes informational illustrations of how the horse was built.

Joshua Chace was awarded the brand new Lam Prize for Creativity and Innovation for his interactive comic Full Plate. The $1,500 Lam Prize is granted to sophomore, junior, or senior from any major who shows dedication, creativity, and innovation.

Full Plate is an interactive comic designed for mobile phones and digital media. The use of a touch screen allows the viewer to progress through images in the application much like one would flip a page of a book to proceed. The benefit of this is the infinite scrolling space that exists within the application and the use of the Z-axis. Images can be placed in such ways that a modern comic book would never be able to accomplish. Thus, pages and the page format are not necessary in a comic designed for digital viewing. A hail of bullets fly into wounds and sandstorms bleed into dragons; the imagery of this interactive comic can flow into one another in beautiful transitions. At a touch, the viewer can witness over 100 illustrations that exist in a 3D space and move with the perspective of your eye. A video of Joshua’s interactive comic can be viewed here.

Congratulations to our incredible illustration seniors!