Juried by Janine Davis, Owner, Moon Dog Pottery, Mercersburg, PA
March 31- April 22, 2011
Wilson College will hold a reception from 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday, March 31, to mark the opening of the Annual Juried Student Art Exhibition. The exhibit, presented by Wilson’s Department of Fine Arts and Dance, will open on March 31, and continue through April 22, 2011 in the Bogigian Gallery, which is located on the second floor of Lortz Hall.
The student show provides a wonderful opportunity for Wilson students to share their work with the community. Like most open calls for entry, this show will feature drawings, paintings, prints, ceramics, photographs, and mixed media artwork with a wide array of subject matter and content. Some works will be directly connected with courses taken by our students, while other pieces will have been developed independent of an art class and/or instruction. Annual juried shows are usually a mixed bag, but that is half the fun!
The exhibit is modeled after the famous Salons of 19th century Paris, when the French government organized an official exhibit, juried by respected artist/academics. These were important exhibitions and were often the only venues for artists to share their work with the public. In 1863, some 3000 artists were rejected from the Salon. Rejection was nothing new to the annual exhibit, it happened every year. The selection process is what gave many artists legitimacy as professionals. However, since so many artists were rejected in 1863, protests erupted which sparked order by Napoleon III to host an exhibit of the refused works so the public could decide for themselves if the artworks were indeed sub-standard. Cezanne, Manet, and Whistler were among the laundry list of artists rejected from the Salon in 1863. By 1874, a group of artists who became known as the Impressionists were exhibiting separate from the official Paris salon.
As the avant-garde pushed further away from academic art, the Salon lost favor with public taste, and the artists exhibiting in the Salon des Refusés (Salon of Refusals), became more popular than the artists exhibiting rigid, often detached works in the state sponsored Annual Salon. So, our Annual Juried Student Art Exhibition also includes a Salon des Refusés, in the spirit of the non-conforming, free-thinking artists refused from the state sponsored event. Works rejected from the exhibit will be displayed in the second and third floor studios of Lortz Hall, and the public are invited to decide for themselves now, as they were then, if the art is sub-standard or not.
This year our juror is Janine Davis, artist/owner of Moon Dog Pottery, located in Mercersburg, PA. We are delighted to have her select the work for our annual exhibit, and look forward to a great show!