BlueVelvetStudio Sid Kamerman |
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I was born in New York City in September 1943. I graduated
from high school in Staunton, VA - a sleepy town in Shenandoah Valley. I
received a B.A. in English from UVA.
For two years I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Ivory Coast, teaching
auto mechanics in French in a small rural town. I had a really tough job
training new Peace Corps Volunteers in Aniere, just outside of Geneva, Switzerland. My wife Jeannie and I taught high
school in Buffalo for two years and then moved to Bloomington, Indiana where I
worked on a Ph.D. in American Fiction and Poetry and Jeannie received a Masters
in Library Science. We moved
to
Pensacola in 1979 and lived there ever since. In 1981, I began taking sculpture classes from Michael Boles at PJC. It began as a lark, quickly progressed
to a serious hobby, and then became a passion. I was working a day job and making art most evenings
until
midnight and most of my weekends.
Unable to keep up this pace much past the age of 50 (I fell asleep at
work twice) I made that most foolish of all possible decisions and quit my day
job in August of 1995. The highlights of my artistic career include winning the first
Cinco Banderas purchase award from the Arts Council of Northwest Florida. In 1995 I received my first commission
and designed and built the three dimensional Star of David at 9th
and Mallory. More
recently, in
2006 I completed a large (13 ½ feet) sculpture located in front of the fine
arts building at Okaloosa Walton College in Niceville, Florida. In March of 2008 I completed and installed a fairly
large
indoor sculpture in the atrium of the College of Public Health, University of
Arkansas for Medical Science in Little Rock. During the past 25 years I have been a frequent participant
in the Great Gulfcoast Arts Festival, the Cinco Banderas Show, as well as
numerous shows and outdoor festivals in the south such as the Winter Park Sidewalk
Art Show, Coconut Grove Art Festival and as far as Ann Arbor, Michigan. I have pieces in private collections
from California to Michigan, Virginia to Key West. |
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