Her Mark 2010 (Click Here for an online preview of this exhibit)

Juror(s):

Art: Maria Elena Buszek
Maria Elena Buszek is an assistant professor of art history at the Kansas City Art Institute. Her curatorial experience began at MoMA in NYC and LACMA in LA. She has curated exhibitions for the Charlotte Street Awards, Greenlease Gallery, Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art, and The Cube. She is working on the traveling exhibition Raised in Craftivity, opening at the Wignall Museum in 2009. Recent publications include Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 2006) and Blaze: Discourse on Art, Women, and Feminism (Cambridge Scholar' Press, 2007). She is a contributor to journal BUST and Kansas City's Review. For more information visit www.mariabuszek.com.

Poetry: Maureen Seaton
Maureen Seaton’s sixth book of poems is Cave of the Yellow Volkswagen (Carnegie Mellon University Press), with cover art by Chicago artist and close friend Niki Nolin. Her previous collections include Venus Examines Her Breast, with cover art by WMG artist and former director Pamela Callahan; and Furious Cooking, with cover art by WMG artist Myrna Charry. Seaton has won numerous prizes for her poetry, including an NEA fellowship, the Lambda Literary Award, the Iowa Poetry Prize, the Audre Lorde Award, and the Pushcart Prize. She has facilitated poetry workshops at Columbia College Chicago, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and at Woman Made Gallery. In 1995/1996, she curated a reading series entitled “Woman As Culture” for the Gallery.

Artisan Gallery - Invitational

Juror(s): Margaret Denny

WCA 2010: From the Center: Now! (Click Here for an online preview of this exhibit)

Juror(s): Lucy Lippard
Lucy Lippard is an internationally known writer, activist, and curator from the United States. She was an early champion of feminist art, and among the first writers to books on contemporary art including From the Center and The Pink Glass Swan, and the recipient of the 1968 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Frank Mather Award for Criticism from the College Art Association, and two National Endowment of the Arts grants in criticism. She has written art criticism for Art in America, The Village Voice, In These Times, and Z Magazine. In 2007 Lippard received the Women’s Caucus for Art’s LifeTime Achievement Award.

Juror's Statement
"Jurying is a painful process, almost as much so for the juror as for the juried. After the initial selections, the remaining decision can be really hard to make. I always choose too many, so this show will be crowded. I miss slides, which were bad enough as stand-ins for a direct experience. The digital format is even less fair to much work, but there is no other choice today for national competitions. That said, I also enjoyed reviewing such a vastly varied group of works demonstrating that feminist art and ideas are alive and well.

Interestingly these works radiate not much further from the center than they did in the early 1970s. There is more polish and perhaps less passion than in the wild and woolly early days of the Women’s Art Movement. But just because some of these images have become familiar over the years, does not, alas, mean that they are any less relevant. At the level of social justice, a huge amount of progress has been made and a huge amount of progress remains to be made.

Of course every jurying process is immensely personal, and because of my own work, I tend to select pieces dealing fairly directly with content. A number of artists courageously confronted child abuse and domestic violence, cultural differences, family traumas. I was struck by a certain melancholy, balanced by an assertive independence and a welcome sense of humor. Another thread, so to speak, was the number of pieces on clothing, specifically dresses. How many of us wear dresses on a regular basis? Not me, for sure. Yet these dresses seem to represent fantasies. They are for little girls and sexy sirens, representing our childhoods (happy and unhappy) and the dreams of glamour and success that remain intertwined in the female image, often seen through a lens of irony or disillusion.

Given the fact that so many of the leading eco-artists are women, there were fewer images than I had hoped for dealing with environmental and political issues, which affect us as women as much as more intimate issues. (I’ve always agreed that the personal is political, but the political is also personal.) Overt Lesbian images also seem to have fallen by the wayside since the 1970s, despite the fact that Queer theory has grandly expanded that field.

I was given, of course, no names and no information whatsoever about the artists, so I have to hope that I’ve included some younger women whose feminism (or not) can be expressed in ways less visible to me in my own seventies. Not surprisingly, the videos were less reminiscent of feminist classics; this is a medium that has come into its own more recently. Nor was there any way for me to tell if any of the art selected was collaborative, a process I consider deeply feminist, brought home in the recent debut of The Heretics -- a film on the Heresies Collective, which provided many of my own epiphanies, a major inspiration to risk more, to support rather than to compete with other women, and to respect the power of more than one.” -Lucy R. Lippard

While in Class (Click Here for an online preview of this exhibit)

Juror(s): Lily Mayfield
Lily Mayfield is a photographic artist and educator. She teaches photography at Columbia College Chicago and College of Dupage. Mayfield has an MFA in photography from Columbia College, and a BFA from University of Florida. Her work has been exhibited nationally. Mayfield had a solo exhibition of her work entitled, Intimate Distance, at Woman Made Gallery in May 2009. For more information visit www.lilymayfield.com.

Artisan Gallery - Invitational I

Juror(s): Margaret Denny

13th International Open (Click Here for an online preview of this exhibit)

Juror(s): Laura Kina
"For the 13th International Open Women Made Gallery received 224 entries from artists working in a wide range of mediums including painting, drawing, photography, fiber, mixed media, and to a lesser extent sculpture, installation, and video. Entries came from across the United States as well as internationally. Thirty-four works by 27 artists were selected.

Thematically many of the works submitted engaged with either issues of the body or landscape. Figuration, and examinations of gendered identity were common subjects. Representational and psychological landscapes, floral and pattern and decoration motifs also abounded. As an invited juror, I chose not to look at where the submissions came from or any biographical details but rather to judge the work based on aesthetic and conceptual considerations as evidenced in both the actual work and the artist statement. Did the work make me stop and look a second time because of its beauty, absurdness, quirkiness, use of materials or innovation? In the context of a women’s gallery, did the work push boundaries that have not been toppled before? Did the work move me in anyway emotionally or prompt me to consider a new topic or even an old topic in a new way?

Judging is always subjective and space is always limited. There’s some good art here, and I hope you enjoy the works selected for the exhibition as much I do. It was an honor to jury this exhibition." -Laura Kina

Laura Kina is an artist, independent curator, and scholar. She is an Associate Professor of Art, Media and Design and Director of Asian American Studies at DePaul University. She earned her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has shown internationally and is represented by Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts in Miami, Florida. She has been involved in Chicago’s Asian American Arts community with DestinAsian (1992-1995), Asian American Artists Collective and Project A (2001-2005), and the Foundation for Asian American Independent Media (1997-2005). For more information visit www.laurakina.com.

Beyond Audubon

Juror(s): Karen Bondarchuk
Karen Bondarchuk received her MFA in sculpture from The Ohio State University, and her BFA in sculpture and video from NSCAD University in Halifax, Canada. She is Assistant Professor of Art at the Gwen Frostic School of Art at Western Michigan University. Her artwork includes sculpture, kinetics, bookmaking, drawing, video and performance, and incorporates a wide array of materials from wool to scavenged tires to bagpipes. Her current work explores the level of artificiality that defines our relationship with the wild, and the reality that most close encounters with wildlife are by human design. Bondarchuk has exhibited and performed in the United States, Canada, Italy, and England, and her work is in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Canada and numerous private collections. For more information visit www.karenbondarchuk.com.

Artisan Gallery: Invitational II / 2010

Juror(s): Margaret Denny

Category: Printmaking

Juror(s): Debora Wood
Debora Wood is senior curator at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, where she takes the leading role in developing the Museum’s exhibitions and collections. She has been at the Block Museum since 1999 and her area of focus is in twentieth-century art and the history and study of prints.

Wood has a BFA from Cornell University and an MFA in printmaking from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is author of the exhibition catalogues for Imaging by Numbers (2008) and Marion Mahony Griffin (2005), and contributing author to catalogue Paths to the Press: Printmaking and American Women Artists, 1910–1960 (2006).

After Adelita

Juror(s): Amy Galpin

Artisan Gallery: Invitational III / 2010

Juror(s):

Mothers

Juror(s): Rachel Epp Buller
Rachel Epp Buller, Ph.D., is a feminist-art historian-printmaker-mama of three whose art and scholarship investigate this balancing act. Her prints have been exhibited in solo and group and shows in Kansas City, Chicago, New York City, and elsewhere and she lectures and publishes widely on issues of motherhood and the maternal body in contemporary art. Her art writing and criticism appears in journals such as Review, Woman’s Art Journal, German Studies Review, and the Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering, in essay collections such as Mothering in the Third Wave (2008), and the forthcoming Mothers Creating / Writings Lives: Motherhood Memoirs, and Being and Thinking as an Academic Mother, and in her own forthcoming book, Reconciling Art and Motherhood. She has worked for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Spencer Museum of Art, and currently teaches at Bethel College in Kansas.