Alumni Karyn Olivier and Tzu-Ju Chen Among 2025 USA Fellows
Karyn Olivier. Photo by Ryan Collerd.
Cranbrook Academy of Art alumni Karyn Olivier (MFA Ceramics 2001) and Tzu-Ju Chen (MFA Metalsmithing 2006) were recently named one of United States Artists’ (USA) 2025 Fellows. The USA Fellowship represents nine creative disciplines: Architecture & Design, Craft, Dance, Film, Media, Music, Theater & Performance, Traditional Arts, Visual Art, and Writing. Each Fellow receives an unrestricted $50,000 award and recognition as an accomplished and innovative artist in the United States and its island jurisdictions.
Born in Trinidad and Tobago, Olivier creates sculptures, installations, and public art. In the last year, she participated in the Whitney Biennial, Prospect.6 Triennial, the Malta Biennale, and unveiled a memorial honoring a formerly enslaved servant in Philadelphia. In 2025, she will unveil a memorial, commemorating more than 5,000 African Americans buried at Bethel Burying Ground.
Olivier is the recipient of numerous awards including the 2020 Anonymous Was a Woman Award, the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, a PEW Fellowship, a NYFA Award, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, the William H. Johnson Prize, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award, and a Creative Capital award.
In addition to her practice, she is a sculpture professor at Tyler School of Art and Architecture.
Tzu-ju Chen
Tzu-Ju Chen grew up in Taiwan and was inspired by her parents who were tailors, her father specialized in Chinese qipao and her mother made contemporary outfits. She immigrated to the US at fourteen and displacement shaped the way she viewed her surroundings.
Chen’s work is inspired by her life and travel experiences, intermingling metalsmithing techniques and design with various artistic traditions from around the world. Her wearable pieces juxtapose found materials with metal. The everyday and precious materials she employs challenge the perceived value of jewelry and express a sense of intimacy.
Chen is the recipient of a 2006-2007 Fulbright Fellowship to China to research traditional Chinese jewelry-making techniques, after graduating from Cranbrook Academy of Art. In addition to her practice, Chen designed jewelry for the fashion industry for fourteen years before pursuing roles in academia. She has exhibited nationally and internationally since 2000, including MAD about Jewelry 2022 at the Museum of Art and Design in NYC. She received an Honorable Mention for the James Renwick Alliance for Craft Chrysalis Award and was a Semi-Finalist for the MacColl Johnson Fellowship with the Rhode Island Foundation.
Chen is the Curatorial Research Associate for Jewelry at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and lives in Massachusetts where she maintains her studio practice and teaches at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University.
Learn more:
2025 USA Fellows – United States Fellows
Award-Winning Alumni and Artists-in-Residence – Cranbrook Academy of Art
