Art St. Louis XXIX, The Exhibition is a juried exhibition featuring works in all media by 43 St. Louis regional artists from Missouri and Illinois.
Art St. Louis XXIX, The Exhibition • October 26-December 26, 2013 • FREE opening reception Saturday, November 16, 6-9 p.m
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Serving as juror for this year's exhibit is Mr. Buzz Spector. An artist and critic whose artwork has been the focus of exhibitions in such museums and galleries as the Art Institute of Chicago, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Mattress Factory, Orange County Museum of Art, and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, Spector works in a wide range of mediums including sculpture, photography, printmaking, book arts, and installation. He has also written extensively on topics in contemporary art and culture, contributing reviews and essays to a number of publications, including American Craft, Artforum, and New Art Examiner. A volume of selected interviews with Spector, Buzzwords, is newly in print from Sara Ranchouse Publishing, Chicago, and Spector is also the author of The Book Maker's Desire, critical essays on topics in contemporary art and artists' books (Umbrella Editions, 1995). Spector earned his B.A. in Art from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in 1972, and his M.F.A. at the University of Chicago in 1978. Spector is the Jane Reuter Hitzeman and Herbert F. Hitzeman Jr. Professor of Art and Dean of the College and Graduate School of Art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Art St. Louis XXIX begins on October 26. A free opening reception was held at Art Saint Louis on Saturday, November 16, from 6 to 9 p.m. The exhibit remains on view through Thursday, December 26, 2013. Gallery hours are Mondays 7 a.m.-4 p.m., Tuesdays through Fridays 7 a.m.-5 p.m., and Saturdays 7 a.m.-4 p.m. Closed Sundays & holidays (closed Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas, New Year's Eve, New Year's Day). Free & open to the public. AWARDS OF EXCELLENCE Congratulations to the following five artists whose artworks were selected by Juror Buzz Spector to receive Awards of Excellence in recognition for having outstanding artworks in this exhibition: Adrian Cox, Hwang (Bo) Kim, Dustin Lucas, Sydnor Scholer, and Sun Smith-Fôret. Congratulations to Nicole Fry, Scott Schlapkohl and Elizabeth Willey on the sales of their artworks through this exhibit. |
FREE EVENT
COFFEE WITH THE ARTISTS: SATURDAY GALLERY TALKS
Join us in the Gallery on the following Saturdays when we host free one-hour Gallery talks at 11 a.m. with featured artists from the current exhibit, Art St. Louis XXIX. Guests can enjoy complimentary coffee tastings courtesy of Mississippi Mud Coffee Roasters while learning about the artists and their artworks.
Some of the artists may bring in samples of their other work or also present a demo of their media & techniques. This is a walk & talk Gallery Talk, so guests will walk with the artists as they talk about their works in the Gallery. Seating is very limited.
Saturday, November 2, 11 a.m. Saturday, November 9, 11 a.m. Saturday, November 23, 11 a.m. Saturday, December 7, 11 a.m. Saturday, December 14, 11 a.m.
Katherine Nelson
John Newman
Joanne Kluba
Elizabeth Willey
Nicole Fry
Dave Rocco
Dustin Lucas
Sun Smith-Fôret
Maggie Wheelock
Dennis Staffne
Art St. Louis XXIX, The Exhibition
Juror’s Statement
"A long life in art affords opportunities of various sorts for a person to cultivate critical judgment. Every artist, after all, judges his or her own work during and after its making, and implicit in anyone’s studio production is the critique of those artworks by others whose premises contradict one’s own artistic values. Indeed, the transition from art student to artist is as likely to come from a rendered judgment (“That sculpture is bad art,” or “That picture has no justification for having been painted”) as from the grasp one suddenly has of the connections between one’s own use of materials and ideas. The connection I draw here is based on a simple premise: that one must be standing somewhere in order to reject standing elsewhere.
At different moments in my professional life I have juried artist grant applications, passed judgment on nominations for artist fellowships, and even participated in the selection of artists to represent the United States at international biennial exhibits. In each of these endeavors my judgments were by and large rejections of the works of artists of established professional standing; which means they’d probably all been rejected many times before. As a working artist, this is a long running circumstance in my own career, but this is not the case for the younger artists among those submitting work to the Art Saint Louis XXIX competition. If their experience is like mine, they may have been rejected in love, jobs, or college applications (all matters of great life consequence) but not many times before for an art exhibit. For persons aspiring to live the artist’s life, the first rejection can remain the most painful.
Let me recognize here first, then, the young artists whose work I did not select for this exhibit. Their work almost unanimously possessed merits that another juror than I may have preferred. For the more experienced artists I did not select I offer as well my appreciation of their endeavor. Lines well drawn and forms well-crafted are present in work you won’t see in my selection here, but I encourage all who applied to keep at their work and the project of learning how to see it better; see it for itself beyond the shadows of ambition and expectation.
Let me share with you my premises for accepting the art on display. First and foremost I looked for evidence of understanding of how materials and techniques work together to make the finished work. Secondly, I looked for evidence of craftsmanship appropriate to the meaning I presumed each individual work to express. I specifically DO NOT mean by this that I expected excellence of craft to be of value, in itself, as something apart from the form of the work. There is plenty of art on view before publics elsewhere that seems to invite us to ask, “How did she do that?” or else “How long did that take?” Trust me, these are not the most important questions that art is capable of raising. I would argue, in fact, that whenever the technique by which a work is fashioned becomes itself the subject of our gaze, whatever other things the work was made to say are being obscured. The best technique is an invisible armature; it operates to direct our attention through itself toward the meanings the artist wishes to share.
This brings me to a third selection criterion, that something of the wholeness of a life is implied in any fashioned thing. There is no absolute value implicit in any material choice for making an artwork, but even the merest quotidian material can be made to offer eloquent testimony of the meaning within its presence on view. In this regard, the individual work evokes not only a community of similar objects, but a public whose customs of appreciation are worth learning about. In this sense, then, we find another way of interpreting the “originality” of a work of art. I am not resident in the imaginary communities conjured up here and there in the works on view, but I am grateful that each brought me, at least momentarily, to places I had not been before."
— Buzz Spector
Some of the 50 artworks featured in Art St. Louis XXIX, The Exhibition:
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