An untitled work by Jessica Stockholder uses such unlikely art supplies as couch cushions, plastic container lids, shoelaces, hardware, a chain, a plastic scoop and a toilet plunger. Tomorrow, the Smithsonian American Art Museum will announce that Stockholder, 48, has won its seventh Lucelia Artist Award. It's given each year to an American artist under 50 of "exceptional creativity" and comes with a cash prize of $25,000. That should buy Stockholder, a professor at Yale, a lifetime's supply of the found materials she favors, which have also included plastic piggy banks, a giraffe lamp and violet bathing suit material. Over the past two decades, she's become famous for assembling such colorful "mixed media" into eccentric agglomerations that can climb a wall or fill a massive gallery.

How much is your art about finding your materials, before you even put them together?
Working with things saves me from the problem of the blank canvas. The materials are freighted with significance to respond to. Sometimes, not knowing what I need, I go out looking for stuff: I go to Home Depot, T.J. Maxx, Goodwill and to tag sales, or I collect things that people have left on the street. At other times I know exactly what I need. I'm interested in how objects and materials "feel," in what wafts off of them, and how they are in the world beyond what their name is. Using language to label things -- calling a chair a chair -- almost renders it invisible. Once having named the object, we cease looking. But in fact, all objects have a whole lot more about them.