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Picking a venue for exhibiting artwork

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Picking a venue for exhibiting artwork

I recently applied for and was accepted into the County Contemporary: All Media Juried Art Show. I am deeply honored to be among the group that was accepted by Juror Mark Richard Leach, Executive Director, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. A representative of the Cultural Council told me they had a good response and had received over 450 entries, of which 44 were being showcased in the exhibit. Again, I felt honored and excited to be part of the exhibit. This exhibit opens June 14 and runs until September 7th and is located at Palm Beach Cultural Council located at 601 Lake Avenue, Lake Worth, Florida 33460. For more information see http://www.palmbeachculture.com
A time-honored challenge for artists is to get ones work exposed to art admirers and collectors.
In pursuit of this goal, I entered the County Contemporary Show as it was sponsored by the Palm Beach Cultural Council. Ever since I became a member earlier this year, I have been impressed with the dedication and professionalism of the Council. The Cultural Council does impressive amount of promotion for the exhibits and other events that are held there. It is also just a wonderful space for an Art Exhibit. I thoroughly enjoyed the most recent Artist as Author exhibit held there and the corresponding lecture series.
When I first got active in the local artist community here in South East Florida, I joined many groups and began to exhibit with them. I found this a good way to get my feet wet, and I learned a lot about shows and juries.
I soon became a bit disillusioned as it seemed that the same people were always winning. While that would be acceptable, if the show and hence all the artwork in it was actually getting exposure, the venues were rarely publicized, and foot traffic to see the exhibit was purely by chance.
When I analyzed that it seemed this, in many cases, to be due to big-fish-in-a-small-pond situation. With member-only shows in local groups with membership numbers of approximately 150-250, and not all of whom would be entering a particular show, the role for newcomers seems to be mainly supplying the prize money in exchange for a miniscule chance of winning. Even with these shows being juried and thus the prize winners truly deserving of the, it becomes a bit of a catch 22. Newer members do not think it is worth the bother to enter and yet the group needs to get a certain number of entries to pull off the show.
To try to address this problem that small groups face, different groups have tried various solutions, such as:
• Limiting the number of times year an artist can win a cash prize.
• Having the juror select the group of painting that will be the prize winners and then the group leaders decides which artist gets which prize.
• Coming up with special awards so that insiders who volunteer can be awarded.

All of these solutions pollute the small pond in my opinion. So at the end of the day I guess I’d rather be a small fish in big pond as long as I like the pond I’m in.