Pirkle Jones Fund Selects Marin’s Tiffanie Turner as the Eleventh Recipient of the Visual Artist Support Program Grant
Posted on July 14, 2021
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Novato (July 14, 2021) The Pirkle Jones Fund (PJF), established to honor Marin photographer Pirkle Jones who died in 2009, has named Tiffanie Turner, a resident of Fairfax, as the eleventh recipient of a grant from its Visual Artist Support Program. The program supports promising emerging and mid-career artists living in Marin County, California. The artist will receive a grant of $25,000.
The PJF Visual Artist Support Program grant aims to recognize, encourage, and nurture artistic imagination and drive, commitment to the creative process, aesthetic standards, and artistic potential.
Tiffanie is a uniquely talented artist who seeks to understand our tolerance of what we deem ugly and what we deem beautiful. She does so by creating giant paper sculptures of botanical forms - predominantly flowers - having realized that the familiarity and accessibility of flowers and plants allows for an “easy in” for people to have conversations about narcissism, aging and loss.
“Having my work validated by receiving the Pirkle Jones Fund Visual Artist grant award means the world to me,” said Tiffanie. “I have worked for a long time to try to make people see that paper flowers can be more than decorative, and to have this type of recognition truly will move the needle much further in "legitimizing" my work, opening more doors so I can share my work with an even wider audience.”
“I consider myself first and foremost a Californian artist,” she continued. “Everything I am doing right now grew from my over 25 years living here, and draws from what I have internalized from the culture and the landscape of this area. I pivoted from a lifelong goal of architecture to my unexpected career as an artist within the time I have resided here, so my career as an artist was born here.
Being connected to the Pirkle Jones mission feels right to me because of my connection to the county of Marin, where I currently live and work, and to greater California. It is a part of my identity as an artist and a human.”
“Receiving this award means that I can launch headlong into my next exhibit (opening September 3, 2022 in San Francisco) and push the themes and forms I work with much further than ever before. It takes me over a year of around-the-clock work to create a new body of work. Having the funds from this award will allow me to take risks I have always wanted to take while sustaining my art practice for the next year, and I am eternally grateful for this. I will also be thinking about how to use the award to experiment with bringing new artists into the fold with me to learn my craft and further their own artistic investigations. ”
Tiffanie’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions across the U.S. and she has appeared in publications such as The New York Times T Magazine, California Homes Magazine, Vogue and O, The Oprah Magazine. She has also published a book, The Fine Art of Paper Flowers, in 2017. Her work can be viewed at www.papelsf.com
For more information or images, contact Lani Alo at the Marin Community Foundation, at either 415.464.2531 or lalo@marincf.org
