Annual Juried Exhibitions at Danforth
By J. Fatima Martins
It’s impossible to examine all of the quality work represented in this year’s ambitious Annual Juried Exhibitions at Danforth Art. This review will spotlight a small sample that I consider to be intellectually poignant; not all of my selections match those artists awarded prizes or honorable mentions by the exhibition curators.
These artists have created compositions that encourage dialogue about the complex and often paradoxical nature of living. They talk about important topics such as environmental degradation, racial and ethnic competition, migration and displacement, and our violent heritage and culture.
Before we examine the artists mentioned more closely, lets look at what the curators of the Annual Juried Exhibition have accomplished this year. From a pool of nearly 500 submissions, two curators selected 230 works by 207 artists. Guest curator and juror Katherine French, Danforth’s director emerita, assembled “Off the Wall,” a focusedexhibition expressing a specific curatorial vision, while in-house curatorial associate Jessica Roscio tackled the overwhelming “Community of Artists,” a larger open survey of regional contemporary trends. Together, these two shows serve as important platforms in which a panorama of regional art developments are exposed and the local creative milieu is defined.
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