The UW Art Museum is set to host its annual Juried UW Student Exhibition. This exhibition is an opportunity for select students from the university to present their artwork and have them critiqued by a juror.
The selections for this year’s art exhibits were made by a gallery owner from San Francisco, named Catharine Clark.
“She runs a pretty decent sized gallery in San Francisco,” Kayle Avery, exhibition coordinator, said. “She has ties to the museum in various ways, we’ve worked on her, worked with her on exhibits from various artists and, so, this is kind of how you get in contact with the juror, for these shows.”
The juror is an important part of the art exhibit because the juror goes through each of the submissions and decides which ones should be included in the exhibit.
“Whenever we do the student show we have a juror, a juror chosen from out of the state,” Avery said. “All the information they get is the piece itself and then the name of the piece, they don’t know the artist, anything else, so we get a whole bunch of variety of stuff.”
The show this year actually had an abnormally high number of submissions this year with 187 different pieces submitted from approximately 130 students.
This high level of submissions can be a negative thing because it means there is more work for the juror.
“So the juror wants only a certain amount of artwork otherwise it can be a little overwhelming to try and select from that many pieces,” Avery said.
The juror was able to get through the artwork and narrowed the submissions down through a variety of criteria for the exhibition.
“Each student can submit up to three and from that the juror tends to select pieces that are visually similar, so a lot of the same artists get in,” Avery said. “So as far as the artists that actually made it into the show, we have 30, and 57 pieces.”
The submissions for this art exhibition can come from any student of the university. This exhibition has pieces from a variety of students from a variety of colleges, not just the College of Fine Arts.
“Every student who attends the University of Wyoming is eligible to submit their artwork,” Avery said. “So we get art majors, education majors, I mean we’ve even gotten, those two pieces in the corner over there in the corner, the two mountains, those were done by a business marketing major.”
This exhibition gives students the opportunity to participate in an exhibit and experience the professional process of submitting artwork to an exhibit.
“We use an online submission process,” Nicole Crawford, museum curator of collections at the art museum, said. “So it teaches the students how to professionally prepare their work to be submitted, you know, for the future.”
The annual student show is a big deal for students and university officials, but there is also a triennial faculty show and it will also be featured in the same area as the student show.
“The faculty show we do once every three years, so yeah it becomes kind of an interesting way to see the faculty art displayed next to the student art and see kind of who, as far as teaching, influenced students on the other side,” Avery said.
With both of these exhibitions taking place at the same time, it makes for an interesting art show.
“You definitely can see connections between the two, which I think is the most important part of having them both on at the same time,” Avery said.
The student art show first started 42 years ago and has since moved location to the UW Art Museum.
“Originally this show was in the Coe Library, right, because that’s where the art museum used to be based then it was in the art department,” Avery said. “And now we host it in the actual museum.”
The Juried UW Student Exhibition opens this Friday, Feb. 10 at 6 p.m. with an awards show at 6:30 p.m. where select students will be awarded with various prizes, including some cash through scholarships.
