Sugden wins artist champion award

FINDLAY — Assistant professor of art, professional artist and filmmaker and world traveler Phil Sugden now gets to add award winner to his list (again), having recently taken home Creative Ohio's Artist Champion award. Sugden was born in England and moved to the U.S as a child. He studied art and language in New York and is currently an artist and assistant professor of art at Bluffton University. His work has been featured in culture centers around the world during a storied career that has lasted decades. With his wife Carole Elchert, Sugden has traveled around the world, making art related to his travels. Most of all, he said he's a humanist. During a brief stint in the Navy, Sugden said he read books that "opened him up to the possibility of traveling," he said. "They changed the direction of my life." After college, he traveled to Tibet with a friend and said he really started to understand more about the world. "It was the first time I met Tibetan refugees and I had no idea what was going on in China, but I learned pretty quick," he said. "It started to soak in about human rights and about making that part of the travels as well." When on his travels, he still creates art, but feels most accomplished by the human rights work he does abroad. "We also bring out a lot of human rights information … When you're in a place like Tibet, which is under communist Chinese repression, they don't allow journalists there. You do what you have to do," he said. "We walked out with letters in our hiking boots so the Chinese wouldn't find them." Sugden created his first documentary film, "White Lotus," about Tibetan culture. Sugden has also sold art and donated the proceeds to nonprofit organizations dedicated to human rights work including UNICEF, Red Cross, Open Arms, Hope House and others. Now, Sugden is working on trying to get his second documentary film distributed, "Activismo," about artists in Cuba. "It was four artists who were considered dissidents by the government down there," he said. "There's a group of artists who do work that they get put in prison for." Sugden said he and his wife did research for almost a year before visiting Cuba with a very small film crew. The whole project was filmed over the course of 10 days and four copies were made of everything that was filmed, "in case we got caught," Sugden said. After four years in post-production, the film won awards in film festivals around the world. He said he believes he won the Creative Ohio award because of his recent work as a documentarian. "It's not about how good your art is or how much talent you have as an artist, it's about what you're doing with your art," he said. While Sugden believes not all art is political, he does believe it is an important tool in dismantling systems of oppression. "(Art) can make statements that we can't make by speaking," he said. "It can be universally understood … Art works." When asked about what receiving the award means to him, Sugden said he appreciates the fact that his peers recognized his work as important. "I don't just sit up here and paint pretty pictures," he said. He said he doesn't know what's next, though. "Every time I make a plan, it goes in a different direction. But that's okay," he said. Mostly, he said he's going to keep doing what he's always done: traveling, teaching and creating art.