Louisville native Susanna Crum moved home after graduating from the University of Iowa with a master of fine arts degree. She brought with her a fiancé, Rudy Salgado, who shares her passion for printmaking. Together, they plan on opening a printmaking studio here in Louisville where artists can produce fine art etchings, screen prints, woodcuts, digital prints and lithographs. Crum accepted the inaugural M.A. Hadley Prize in Visual Art this morning. The $5,000 prize is awarded from the George and Mary Alice Hadley Fund at the Community Foundation of Louisville, with assistance from the Louisville Visual Art Association. Crum plans on putting her award toward the development of the studio, which she said will be modeled on other regional printmaking studios that offer exhibit and work spaces. “We’ll travel to these print shops and interview the directors and other studio members, then bring their recommendations and techniques back to Louisville," said Crum. "We’ll travel to regional businesses which build or restore printmaking equipment. It’s really important when one builds and develops a studio to really know both how to maintain and expand the resources.” Crum and Salgado also plan on inviting an established printmaking artist to Louisville for a workshop and an exhibit. That entrepreneurial spirit combined with artistic passion exemplifies the Community Foundation's goal for this prize, CEO Susan Barry said. She called it "the quintessential act of stewardship" for the Foundation, which has awarded grants in the arts and humanities from the Hadley fund since its inception in 1991. Mary Alice Hadley, who died in 1965, founded the Hadley Pottery Company in 1940, combining her training in art and design with her family's tradition of working in clay."Last year I began learning more about Mary Alice, learned more about her history, and thought the fund really speaks to grants but it doesn’t really get to who Mary Alice Hadley was. At her core, she was an artist," Barry said. "With stewardship, you have some discipline but you also have some freedom. So we thought, how can we present an opportunity to the next generation of Louisville artists and honor her at the same time?" At a ceremony in Public, LVAA's Whiskey Row gallery, Crum spoke about Louisville's recent growth in opportunities for visual artists to organize and the importance of community to a printmaking studio. She also noted Louisville's awareness of its own history, which plays a key role in traditional printmaking forms. LVAA executive director Shannon Westerman praised Crum's interest in combining old and new in her approach to printmaking. “Her background and passion is in printmaking, but not just in terms of printmaking as an antiquity but printmaking with technology in the 21st century,” he said.
