What jurors look for and art + craft

A Summer Day Long Ago (Feeding Chickens)  (my quilt in the local art show)

I like to enter some of the local art shows and I’m always very interested in juror’s statements.  At our local annual art show (36th year!) we have been very fortunate to attract some very well qualified jurors.  At an art show every medium is represented and the juror needs quite a breadth of knowledge and awareness of what is happening in many different areas especially in a town with a large college art department (professors and students compete), many studio artists and great rafts of hobby artists.  It’s a lovely mix!  This year the show was judged by Carla Hanzal, Curator of Contemporary art at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC and she gave some very clear pointers as to what jurors look for.

Ms Hanzal stated that every juror  brings  biases to the task and it’s important to acknowledge that fact up front to oneself.  Judging a show is a combination of intuition, knowledge and training.  Looking, as she does, at vast quantities of art has helped her to hone her ability to make value judgments.   She feels that in shows where a lot of people are entering a lot of different works, it is inappropriate to select to some overall idea or theme – that each work should be judged on its own merits and not on how it fits into a show.  It is very hard when one is rejected from a show, not because one’s work isn’t “good enough” but because it “didn’t fit in with the other pieces”.  If it’s a large show, the work is usually spread over a significant area and this should not be an issue, but I know I have encountered it more than once.

Double Exposure: Spire  (selected for a different regional art show)

Here are some of the features she feels a juror looks for:

1. A strong design is important: “how well does the work utilize elements of design?”.

2. Work that has meaning and content; and, as a curator  of contemporary art, she personally also looks for work that that reflects aspects of our contemporary society.

3.  An excellent example of a particular type of art.

4.  Careful craftsmanship is very important because sloppy work distracts one from the content.

5. Originality of concept, a new way of expressing something.

6. Ms Hanzal was asked the age-old question of art v craft; I wrote a blog on this some time ago expressing my view that the two were orthogonally related rather than two ends of a continuum, but she looks at it quite differently.  She stated that she thought they were different, though there were definitely grey areas especially now as many contemporary artists are using media that were traditionally thought of as “craft”  and  people that were traditionally crafters are now beginning to “incorporate aspects of meaning beyond stellar execution”.    We have seen a lot of that in the art quilt world with people who have formal art training, possibly a background in painting or sculpture,  producing amazing and totally innovative art quilts.    However, Ms Hanzal felt the significant difference was the intent of the maker.  Craft, she feels, “has a lineage that may be traced to functionality and technical proficiency or mastering a medium”.  Craft becomes art when function is not the intent, rather when the intent “is at the service of meaning”.

7. Art that was totally distilled down to its formal qualities is no longer relevant, she feels.  For she feels that if you look at a piece of art purely in formal terms (a composite of  elements of design and the medium itself) you minimize the importance of meaning.  And, once a piece is given a title that implies that the work is a fictional reference to a place, or object or state of mind.  The title (if one is given) is very definitely part of the piece for it acknowledges the subjectivity  thus created.  She quoted Edgar Wind  from his book Art and Anarchy:
“it is by means of fiction that the artist becomes serious and imposes his seriousness upon us in the form of feeling, of curiosity, awe and wonder.”  

Double Exposure: Shadows (selected for a local art show)

This book sounds quite fascinating, so it’ll be on my library list.  Here are a couple of titillating quotations:

“...effective censorship is a contradiction in terms. Like pruning, it gives new vigor to what it cuts back; but if it attacks the root, it destroys the plant it is supposed to save.”

“If modern art is sometimes shrill, it is not the fault of the artist alone. We all tend to raise our voices when we speak to persons who are getting deaf.”

The quotation about censorship or criticism is a wonderful one:  so many art quilters are opposed to all criticism  because they feel that the artist needs nurturing and support, not judgment.   Likening a good criticism to a careful pruning is a wonderful analogy: how valuable to have one’s dead wood cut out so that lively new shoots can emerge!   Talking of which, I won’t be blogging for a week or so because the surgeons have decided to do a bit of pruning on me!  But I’ll be back!  So, if you have been, thanks for reading!  All comments, positive and negative, are very welcome!   Elizabeth