Sharon Church McNabb, award-winning professor emerita at University of the Arts and internationally renowned studio jeweler, has died at 74

Sharon Church McNabb, 74, of Philadelphia, award-winning professor emerita at the University of the Arts and internationally renowned metalsmith and studio jeweler, died Sunday, Dec. 25, of progressive supranuclear palsy at her home in Chestnut Hill.

Known professionally as Sharon Church, she was recognized around the world as a preeminent studio jeweler, and her one-of-a-kind creations feature, in her own words, “shimmering beauty along with its dark, damp and mysterious underpinnings.”

Drawn throughout her life to the exhilaration of creation and transformative power of art, Ms. Church was inspired and energized by nature, and often combined precious metals and stones with carved pieces of wood, bone, and horn, elements she said “physically embody the cycle of birth, life, death and renewal, and speak to the riddle of our existence.”

Her eclectic portfolio includes sculptures, pendants, scepters, necklaces, bracelets, brooches, and other adornments that she said “evolved from seed and a division of cells and burst with life.” She showed her work at hundreds of exhibitions around the world, and it resides in permanent displays at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, and other museums, galleries, and private collections in Boston, Houston, Los Angeles, Sweden, Germany, Australia, and elsewhere.

“Her influence on contemporary jewelry is pervasive and persistent,” a colleague said in a tribute. “She is considered one of the United States’ greatest treasures of contemporary jewelry.”

Among other honors, Ms. Church earned a craftsman’s fellowship grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1978, won a 2010 Medal of Distinction from the Philadelphia Art Alliance, was designated as a master of American craft by the American Craft Council in 2015, and received a 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of North American Goldsmiths.

“To make something with your hands, to know that you exist, to see that that existence has value, even for someone who just likes doing it, it has enormous value,” she told the American Craft Council in 2012.

As a longtime professor of craft and material studies in the School of Art at the University of the Arts, she joined the faculty in 1979, when it was the Philadelphia College of Art, and went on to win the school’s 1989 and 2003 Venture Fund Awards, 1999 Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award, and 2004 Richard C. von Hess Faculty Prize.

She also won the James Renwick Alliance for Craft’s Distinguished Craft Educator Award in 2008, and told the American Craft Council: ”I love the act of teaching, the exchange that happens, the discovery. … I don’t worry about getting ahead or any of that stuff. I just worry about communicating to a group of students in a way that will enable them to make their own work.”

Ms. Church also wrote articles for craft publications, lectured at other schools, workshops, and museums, and served on boards, councils, committees, and juries. She retired from teaching in 2014, and a former student said in a tribute: “She was the original jewelry siren, calling and welcoming young artists into the world of jewelry and metalsmithing.”

Born Oct. 15, 1948, in Richland, Wash., Sharon Church and her family moved to Wilmington and she graduated from Tower Hill School in 1966. She studied with noted craftsman Earl Pardon and received a bachelor’s degree at New York’s Skidmore College in 1970, then worked with goldsmith Albert Paley and earned a master’s degree at the School for American Craftsmen at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York in 1973.

She married Andrew McNabb in the early 1980s, and they had daughter Eliza and lived in Mount Airy. He died in 1993, and she married Phillip Johnson in 2003, and they lived for the last decade in Chestnut Hill.

Ms. Church attended the Church at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, enjoyed reading, gardening, and classical music. She rambled often through Wissahickon Valley Park, hosted fun-filled holiday parties, and shopped at the Weavers Way cooperative grocery.

Most of all, she said on her website, she enjoyed “the rich exchange that characterizes the community of studio artists who currently reside in Philadelphia.”

Her daughter said: “She was fierce, and she had a deep conviction and a strong internal compass that her artwork interact with the world and others.”

In addition to her daughter and husband, Ms. Church is survived by a brother and other relatives.

A celebration of her life is to be held later.

Donations in her name may be made to the Morris Arboretum of the University of Pennsylvania, 100 E. Northwestern Ave., Philadelphia, Pa. 19118.