The winner of a 2009 Strauss Fellowship, Novie Trump's sculptures have been praised by Washington, DC area art critics who described her as "flexing her artistic muscles in 11 works in ceramic, porcelain, glass, found objects, metal, stoneware, cork and an elegant assortment of porcelain bees. She also joins an emerging new movement centered around the Greater DC area that is breathing artistic life into genres of art historically associated with craft rather than high art."
Novie Trump was born in Sylva, North Carolina and received her degree in Classical Archaeology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1995. After graduation, she studied art at the Corcoran College of Art and Design. In 2004 she became the executive director of the Lee Arts Center in Arlington, VA, a leading center in the mid-Atlantic region for ceramics and printmaking. During this time she curated several key regional exhibitions, among them “The Narrative Figure” at the Ellipse Arts Center which featured a number of world-renowned figurative sculptors. She also fostered an exchange with Wales Arts International, hosting an exchange of ceramic works between the US and Wales, which was chosen by Ceramic Review as the “must see exhibition of the summer”. In 2008 she was invited by Fireworks Studios in Cardiff, Wales to be their first international visiting artist. Her two month residency, sponsored by Wales Arts International, culminated in two solo exhibitions: one at the Llantarnam Grange Arts Centre in Cwmbran and the other at the prestigious Ceramic Archives Museum in Aberystwyth, Wales.
Her work is in public and private collections and has been shown throughout the United States and the UK in solo and group exhibitions. The Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC , the Museum of Contemporary Craft in the Pacific Northwest and the US Botanic Garden in Washington DC have exhibited her work. She has completed several public art commissions, among them a large tile mural at the National Institutes of Health and a large-scale outdoor sculpture for the Riverside Center in Anacostia, MD, which was funded by a Creative Communities Initiative Grant received in 2008.
Her sculptures have been featured in several publications such as Home and Design Magazine and the Lark Books 500 Series. In 2009, she and her work were featured in a film documentary by Colby Hartburg.
Novie Trump is founder and director of Flux Studios, a contemporary art space in Mt. Rainier, Maryland, where she maintains her studio. Flux houses the professional studios of six artists, maintains a small informal gallery space with rotating exhibitions, hosts master workshop programs and offers an international visiting artists residency program.