Firelands professor honored

HURON TWP. — A BGSU Firelands professor recently received an impressive honor for his work. David Sapp is a 2021 recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award grant for visual art. The program recognizes outstanding accomplishments by artists in a variety of disciplines. Awards give artists the resources to experiment and explore their art forms, develop skills and advance their careers and receive affirmation and acknowledgement for outstanding work. Competitive applications focused on the merit of past artistic work, combined with an open panel review conducted by nationally recognized professionals, ensuring that only the most exceptional individuals receive funding. For 26 years, Sapp has taught studio art and art history at BGSU Firelands. He's also the director of the Little Gallery on campus. His masters of fine arts degree was completed in drawing at Bowling Green State University. Sapp attended the Cleveland Institute of Art and is a graduate of Mount Vernon Nazarene University in art and psychology. He hails from Knox County, Ohio and is a 1978 graduate of Mount Vernon Senior High School. Sapp's art has appeared widely in several venues across the United States such as the Sandusky Cultural Center, the Carrington Gallery in Sandusky; Firelands Association for the Visual Arts in Oberlin; The Sculpture Center in Cleveland; The Griffin Museum of Photography in Boston and the Toyohashi City Museum in Toyohashi, Japan. His submission to the Ohio Arts Council was a collection of recent drawings created in his studio, the fruition of imagery and experience from several decades. "In committing to the creative act, my primary goal is to actualize a work of art that embodies natural, immediate, and responsive expression," Sapp told review panelists. "My aim is not to produce the sensational or the intellectually novel, but to validate the complexity of the human presence, to find a narrative truth in the human condition as I might interpret it at a particular moment."