World-famous curators select undergraduate work
Each year, multiple departments within VCUarts hold their respective undergraduate exhibitions to showcase student work — what sets the Fine Arts apart is their guest jurors, who come from prestigious institutions to decide which works are worthy of display.
More than 600 pieces were submitted to this year’s Undergraduate Juried Fine Arts Exhibition, but only 120 were selected by highly-respected curator Toby Kamps to be displayed in VCU’s Anderson Gallery until April 3.
This year’s juror is especially important, according to some of those who helped organize the exhibition.
“Toby is really one of the best and the brightest in the country right now in terms of modern and contemporary art,” said Traci Garland, interim registrar and assistant director of Facilities and Administration for the Institute for Contemporary Art.
Garland was one of multiple faculty at the university who helped in putting together the design and logistics of the exhibition. She said that the annual event allows for students to be reviewed by well-known jurors whose approval carries a lot of weight in their portfolios.
The fine arts exhibition features work by undergraduates in photography, film, painting, printmaking, sculpture, theatre and others. The selections by the juror are somewhat reliant on their taste, but they typically make an effort to be unbiased, Garland said.
Toby Kamps, who is the curator of modern and contemporary art at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, was spoken highly of by this year’s organizers.
He was brought in the night before his deliberations. In a single day, Kamps had to look at more than 600 individual art pieces and then immediately decide which would be featured in the gallery. The process, by design, lends itself to subjectivity.
“They take their job very seriously and they realize this is an education situation, which is different from what they’re usually doing,” said Michael Lease, exhibition manager at the Anderson Gallery. “They usually want to make sure there’s a good representation of all of the departments.”
This exhibition, like many throughout history, has come under fire from artists who feel as though they’re not being given a fair chance to be featured in the gallery.
One student, who had been rejected during the juror’s deliberations for four years, held a salon day refusé.
The salon day refusé is a tradition that has its roots in France, whereby artists hold performance or place installation pieces in or near galleries which have rejected their work.
His performance involved him moving throughout the gallery, rubbing his face on the walls and floor below each piece featured in the gallery.
“It’s part of the job when you’re an artist to be critiqued and refused and rejected,” Garland said. “You put your work into the world and you want to make a living off it, you sometimes get told your stuff isn’t good.”
Still, Lease was assured that each particular judge, even when confronted with their own personal biases, were making an effort to be more inclusive than exclusive of different styles and mediums.
In addition, Kamps gave an hour-long lecture that might help explain his reasoning behind the choices he made. He centered his around art history, but jurors in the past have focused more on the themes they observed, as well as mentioning what works are particularly strong.
Lease also said that the job of a curator is particularly important, even in educational institutions, for being able to “cut through the noise” to find exceptional works.
These two members of the exhibit’s team said that Kamps coming to VCU is indicative of the success of the arts programs, and that him and other jurors have been greatly impressed by the work done by the undergraduates here.
“Curiosity about our school of the arts is why they agree to come,” Garland said. “We’re in a really lucky position where we have an amazing reputation … They want to see what’s so great here.”
The fine arts exhibition will be on display at the Anderson Gallery on the Monroe Park Campus until April 8. The two other undergraduate exhibitions in Design and Kinetic Imaging will be housed in the Depot and the Fine Arts Building.
Spectrum Editor, Austin Walker
Austin is a sophomore print journalism major. He started at the CT as a contributing writer, and frequently covers work done by artists and performers both on and off campus. He hopes to one day be a columnist writing about art that impacts culture, politics and documenting the lives of extraordinary and everyday people. // Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn
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