For More Information, Contact:
Ruth Tonachel, 570-268-4093 or Jennifer Swain, 570-265-7455

For Immediate Release
April 15, 2009

Ken Ely and Ross Shourds Honored With PA Council on the Arts Fellowships

Northern Tier traditional artists Ken Ely of Susquehanna County and Ross Shourds of Tioga County are among a select group of Master Folk and Traditional Artists statewide to be honored recipients of Fellowship and Apprenticeship awards in 2009.

PA Council on the Arts (PCA) Fellowship awards honor and recognize excellent practitioners of traditional performing arts and crafts who are known as masters within their communities and have made outstanding contributions to the preservation and development of their art. Ely and Shourds received two of only three fellowships statewide in 2009 for folk and traditional arts.

Ken Ely is a traditional dry-laid stone wall builder. He began building and repairing stone walls while in his teens, learning in part from an older man at an estate in Dimock, PA and, in part, “from the walls themselves and all those who built them.” At each repair site, Ken studied how the wall had been built, thus drawing on the knowledge of generations before him. Ken teaches workshops in stone wall building and has been a demonstrator on the Susquehanna County Artists' Open House Weekend for nine years. Many of his exquisite walls can be found in the Montrose area. In 2007, Ken was a featured artist in “From Heart to Hand,” an annual exhibit of regional folk and traditional arts sponsored by the Northern Tier Cultural Alliance.

Ross Shourds is a fourth generation decoy carver, originally from the Barnegat Bay area of New Jersey. He began as an apprentice in his uncle’s shop at the age of ten and has been carving bird decoys for forty years. His great-grandfather, Harry Vanuckson “Nucky” Shourds is the “father” of the Barnegat Bay decoy, a hollow core lead-weighted style that is still used today. Ross describes his work as more decorative in style than that of his family tradition but his techniques still use the traditional hand tools used for over a hundred years. After moving to Tioga County in the 1980’s, Ross branched out from shorebirds and began carving song birds native to the Northern Tier. At the request of local hunters, he also carves crow decoys.

Ross has been featured in “From Heart to Hand” a number of times in the past and his work will be included in the show this year as it focuses on arts that support our hunting and fishing heritage. The show will open September 4, 2009 at the Gmeiner Art & Cultural Center in Wellsboro, PA.

Ross was awarded a PCA Fellowship in 2007. This year he has also been awarded an Apprenticeship grant which will allow him to pass on his art to student, Gary Roof.

The Northern Tier Cultural Alliance (NTCA) is proud of the accomplishments of both of these artists who keep traditions alive and dynamic with their work. Both of them will also be featured in a statewide exhibit of folk and traditional arts, “Making It Better:: Folk Arts in Pennsylvania Today” that will open in Erie in late 2009 and tour major galleries throughout the state for at least two years afterward.

Traditional Arts Fellowships are designed to honor and recognize excellent practitioners of traditional arts who are known as masters within their cultural communities. Although artistic excellence is the primary criteria for selection, the depth of the applicant's knowledge of the tradition - and their contribution to the preservation and/or development of the art form within their cultural community - are of fundamental importance in the evaluation process.

Apprenticeships in Traditional Arts grants are designed to support the learning of traditional arts within cultural communities across the state. Grants provide funding to partnerships between a master traditional artist and a qualified apprentice that enable a master to train the apprentice in more advanced techniques or repertoire. The PCA collaborates with the Institute for Cultural Partnerships to provide administrative services for the PCA’s Folk & Traditional Arts Fellowship & Apprenticeship program.

NTCA serves as one of seven Regional Folk Arts Support Centers in partnership with the PA Council on the Arts (PCA) and the Institute for Cultural Partnerships in a statewide Folk Arts Infrastructure Initiative that seeks “to strengthen awareness and understanding, as well as participation in, traditional arts across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania."

In support of its mission and the Folk Arts Infrastructure Initiative, NTCA now offers support to artists and community organizations from 10 northern Pennsylvania counties: Bradford, Cameron, Clinton, Lycoming, McKean, Potter, Sullivan, Susquehanna, Tioga and Wyoming.

For more information about the work of the Northern Tier Cultural Alliance to document and preserve the cultural arts and traditions of our region, go to www.ntculturalalliance.org.

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