Jurying Day Two

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Todays efforts were to finalize the selection of art to go into the Mayor's Art Show. I think its fitting to reveal more details about how the selction process happens (as that is one of the points of this journal!).

Yesterday, on the first day of jurying, the jurors worked independantly selecting 50-60 pieces each out of the 444 submitted. We recorded our votes on an information sheet that contained the title, number code (instead of artist name), medium and price of the art work. We also visually marked the artwork with a color post-it note, each juror having their own color. Works that receive two or more votes move to be considered in the second round of viewing. In addition to the flagging with post-it notes, each juror is allowed to "star" a selection meaning it was guarenteed of moving to the second day of jurying for consideration.

I had a slight advantage in yesterday's jurying process in that I was the slowest juror. Both Mr. Vitri and Mr Walsh had finished flagging their art works with post-it notes by the time I finally started my flagging. This caused me to adjust my art selection ever so slightly... if an art work I had marked on my sheet had already received two votes, I chose to apply my vote to a different piece. Sowing my wild oats of hope of selection if you will.

However, as I tried to fall asleep the night of the first day of jurying, I realized I just set myself up for soo many more choices. I had to remind myself that this was a good thing. It had spread hope to more artworks.

Enough about day one... lets talk about day two!

Mayor Kitty Piercy came to have breakfast with us at the Jacob's Gallery this morning. This was a wonderful event that flew by too quickly! Mayor Piercy had free reign to pick out a piece of art from the submissions to enter into the show as a special Mayor's Pick. Her thoughts on selecting an art work as the Mayor were wonderful and simply stated: several works touched her as works she would like to live with, but she was interested in picking art for the city of Eugene.

I am proud of Mayor Piercy's chosen artwork, however I am sworn to secrecy about the work itself! So many people and artists will be specifically pleased with her selection (yes, that is an awkwardly vague comment, I'll expand on my opinions after the choice is revealed officially). I can't tell you yet what she picked, but I can let you in on a hint: if you want to know before everyone else what the Mayor picks... volunteer for the Jacob's Gallery or become a patron. That way you will be invited to breakfast with the Mayor next year. Then you will be the one with the secret. Another hint? You can see her selection in the images I posted in yesterday's entry. Hmmm, maybe that was more like teasing than a hint...

Overnight, Tina tabulated our selections from day one and we found that 36 works had received a star or a vote of two or more. Being the easy going jurors that we are, we decided before walking back into the room of art that these would automatically go into the Mayor's Art Show. We approximated that this would leave us with 25 more artworks to choose.

We walked together around the room and casually talked about our flagged works. In this walk through the room we choose several more art works. Then we each set out on our own to select several more pieces, in effect we gave ourselves the ability to star works to advance into the show. And before we knew it we had 61 pieces of artwork selected.

Did everything I like get in? No. Do I like every piece of artwork that is in the show? Maybe not. However, I take these as indicators that we as jurors were able to act somewhat independently at times. Not everything was agreed on in consensus. We had a couple of instances where we lobbied each other for the inclusion of an artwork. Sometimes it worked and the art was then flagged as going into the show, and sometimes it didn't advance the artwork in question.

Jurying 444 works of art was a mouthful... and I'm still chewing.