Carver Center teacher wins national artist travel prize

TOWSON, MD—The National Artist Travel Prize has been awarded to a Carver Center teacher, and will allow her to travel to document ghost forests along the mid-Atlantic coast and to Germany.

Sherry Insley, a visual arts teacher at the George Washington Carver Center for Arts and Technology, has won the $7,000 prize from the Municipal Art Society of Baltimore City. The prize is “an annual collaboration between the Municipal Art Society of Baltimore, which sponsors the prize, and the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts, which manages the prize,” said the Municipal Art Society of Baltimore City in a statement.

Insley, a mixed media artist, works primarily in photography, video, printmaking, and artist books. She has exhibited her work in the U.S. and internationally, and has won numerous awards for her work, including the Maryland Art Education Association Secondary Art Educator of the Year nominee in 2023, and the Juror’s Choice award winner in the Maryland Federation of the Arts American Landscapes Exhibit in 2023.

She is also a winner of the Maryland State Arts Council Independent Artist Award, a Sur Edna Foundation awardee, and has served as an Artist in Residence through the Hive Maker Space. She holds degrees from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Insley said that she plans to use the prize to further her work documenting “ghost forests,” which occur when storms, rising sea levels, and climate change push salt water inland causing trees to die. “In addition to continuing to photograph ghost forests in the Chesapeake Bay watershed and mid-Atlantic coast, and to capture ghost forests in Europe, potentially in the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, or Croatia,” she said.

This article was written with the assistance of AI and reviewed by a human editor.

Photo via BCPS