The Manship Artists Residency is delighted to announce that sculptor Morgan Dummitt, NSS will be the Walker Hancock Sculptor-in-Residence in January 2024. The residency is a new artist-in-residence program piloted by the National Sculpture Society (NSS) and the Manship Artists Residency. Dummitt should feel quite at home in our beautiful setting, the former summer residence and studio of Paul Manship, past NSS President.
The residency is named after the late Cape Ann sculptor and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts instructor Walker Hancock (1901-1998). Walker was a Fellow of the National Sculpture Society and was elected by his peers to Honorary Fellow in 1992. Best known for the ethereal Pennsylvania Railroad War Memorial located in Philadelphia’s Thirtieth Street railroad station, Hancock also served his country as an army officer and “Monuments Man,” responsible for the repatriation of stolen cultural treasures after World War II. The one regret of his career was his involvement with the Confederate Memorial at Georgia’s Stone Mountain, to which he offered technical support. One of Hancock’s last sculptures was a bust of W.E.B. Dubois for Harvard’s Memorial Hall.
In 2004, Dummitt began studying the figure at the Art Students League of New York. He earned a Certificate from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and studied at the Florence Academy of Art and the Pelletieri Stone Carving Academy. He served an extensive apprenticeship with renowned marble carver Fred X. Brownstein, FNSS. Since 2013, he has been a member of the Philadelphia Traction Company, an artist community and communal workshop. In 2016, Dummitt had a residency at the St. Gaudens Historic Site in Cornish, New Hampshire. He has exhibited his bronze and marble sculpture with the National Sculpture Society (New York, NY), the Hudson Valley Art Association, the Harrisburg Museum of Fine Art (Harrisburg, PA), and the Springfield Art Association (Springfield, IL), among others.
Applications for the residency were accepted in early 2023 and were reviewed by a jury of three that included two NSS Fellows, Meredith Bergmann and John Belardo, along with sculptor Kim Radochia, who is a member of the MARs Board of Trustees.
The residency is funded through the generous donations of friends and relatives of Walker Hancock who wish to perpetuate his memory, as well as an artist stipend from the NSS. We have been working towards this possibility for some time. Many thanks to all who have made this sculpture residency a reality!
