Sarah Braman Wins MFA Woman Artist Prize

Sarah Braman, an Amherst artist whose work combines abstract painting and sculpture to disorienting, curious effect, has been named the winner of the Museum of Fine Arts’ 2013 Maud Morgan Prize.

Braman will receive $10,000 and her work is scheduled to be presented in the Boston museum’s Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art in November 2013. Coincidentally her art is scheduled to be featured in the group show “Paint Things: Beyond the Stretcher,” which opens at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln on Jan. 27.

The biennial prize “honors a Massachusetts woman artist who has demonstrated creativity and vision, and who has made significant contributions to the contemporary arts landscape.” It was established in 1993 and named in recognition of the pioneering New England painter Maud Morgan (1903–1999).

“Known especially for her sculptures, which combine used items with jewel-toned spray paint or translucent boxes upended at light-catching angles, Braman breathes new life into found materials,” the museum reports. “She has incorporated objects as diverse as a dirty desk, spray painted foam rubber, the roof of a truck, wooden doors, and a chrome vanity with highly formal, minimal, and clean elements like cast steel and brightly colored Plexiglas. The resulting works are carefully balanced compositions that bring a sense of discovery via disorientation as you move around their complex structures, at once delicate and powerful.”