Roxanne Yamins '12, a student sculptor and painter from Great Neck, N.Y., has won the Cornell Undergraduate Artist Award for 2011 from the Cornell Council for the Arts. With its proceeds, she proposes creating a series of sculptures reflecting a common, architectural phenomenon in Ithaca -- the front porch.

The annual award recognizes an outstanding undergraduate student who has demonstrated talent, dedication and notable achievement in one or more artistic disciplines at Cornell. The winner receives a monetary award and presents his or her work on campus.

Yamins was nominated for the award by the art department for her work, which focuses on the role of marginal spaces in everyday life.

"By creating architectural and sculptural statements in a variety of materials, she displaces our sense of the normal boundaries between the inside and the outside, the public and the private, and the official and the casual," said Iftikhar Dadi, chair of Cornell's art department, in his nomination letter.

After her nomination, Yamins proposed a project, "Meanings of Our Space," consisting of three sculptures depicting the ubiquity of porches in Ithaca. The proposal called for fragments of porches, including floorboards, latticing and railing, to be constructed into 4-by-3-foot sculptures and installed on Libe Slope at Cornell, on the banks of one of the campus gorges and in Collegetown. She hopes to install the sculptures by the end of the summer.

In 2008, she won a grant from the National Academy of Fine Arts to study art in Florence, Italy. In 2005 her painting, "Man Sitting," was one of 40 works from the Scholastic Art Awards selected for a special exhibition in Washington, D.C., by the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.