For many years during my active art production, I participated in the
exercise known as Juried Exhibitions. I still remember the excitement as a group of my friends and I prepared our entries for the first such exhibition I ever entered, the long-lived Bradley National Print and Drawing Exhibition, which I had the pleasure of judging this fall. I also recall our delight when the results came back, and one of our group, Janet Maher (who now teaches in Maryland), discovered that one of her prints was accepted. When Beauvais Lyons of the University of Tennessee noticed that I agreed to serve as juror for three print exhibits this fall, he emailed inviting me to write a short piece about juried exhibitions for the SGC newsletter, which of work by a single artist?

Beyond the somewhat false notion of professional security (more on this later), what I have found useful about the juried show is that it continues to foster community among artists whose focus often is works on paper – collectively one of the most under appreciated media in visual art (until its recent elevation for a few anointed artists, like Raymond Pettibon who exhibits dozens of drawings all at once as a "piece", or, Toba Khedori who creates enormous, wall-sized drawings). Those of you who read this are members of said community, and you all know the frustration to which I allude, as well as the importance of passing on traditions. Juried shows are a part of this tradition which dates back to the etching societies of the nineteenth century. The vast majority of entrants to juried exhibits are from outside of metropolitan centers for art (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, for instance), and as the catalogues for these exhibits get passed along, their history becomes continuous. In this sense, juried shows, like group portfolios, are a form of folk art, and they share folk art's rich traditions as well as the self-retarding ones. Unfortunately, these latter traditions include preaching to the converted, or, having the same conversation continuously. Everyone is so indoctrinated, very little critical dialogue is instigated by the exhibition.

To believe that juried exhibitions really matter in the overall scheme of professional things, one need only look at a few resumes in commercial galleries. Generally, galleries will leave juried exhibitions off an artist's dossier, largely because they are not considered significant career builders as are solo exhibitions and well-placed, well-conceived group exhibitions. Why? It has something to do with the problem of the juried show in general, how art is presented and appreciated, and the hierarchies that we have constructed for art. For participating artists, the juried show is a somewhat anonymous affair, as very few entrants ever see the show. I have seen many of these exhibitions, and they range from hastily displayed chock-a-block conglomerations in spaces not normally meant to display art for serious contemplation, to elegantly installed displays in the immaculate white-walled cube we came to expect in the late-twentieth century. Sometimes exhibitions are laid out over several venues with drive-between distances, making it very difficult to experience the show as one entity (the Bradley exhibition will be installed this way). Mostly, the experience of seeing a juried exhibition is akin to moving through a series of individual moments, often without a context, or a difficult-to-discern context. (The enormous international exhibitions, like those in Venice and Kassel are similar).

A curator of an exhibition is constantly looking for correspondences between works. This makes the task of judging a scant one to three works by an artist – who often submits different "flavors" of work to a juried exhibit – an extremely difficult one. In a museum with deep holdings, one sees the broad sweep of an artists oeuvre, and the curator can make more informed choices about which works to include in an exhibit. A context that takes viewers beyond the pure joy of looking can be found. Certainly, I have no argument against the pure joy of looking—I live for this. But taken to task about the value of one kind of exhibition experience versus another, I have to say that certainly it is far more satisfying to see a body of work by one or only a few artists, than to see dozens of individual works in a salon-style offering. However, what we have is a juried exhibition, so how can they be made more meaningful and valuable to print artists especially?