Art show judging info needed

Thats a hard one. As one who has been judged, but hasn't judged, I haven't seen any set criteria for judging. I have gotten into some shows, and not others, where the quality of the other artists stuff was the same. I have gotten into shows when others haven't and our quality is the same. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Personally, I would like for the judges to see my stuff in person, not in slides or on photo.

robo hippy

There should be some information at the AAW site, or someone there can surely direct the OP to folks with experience. They do a lot of judging and, I suppose, have some guidelines.

Take a peek at the guidance that is given to entrants on other competitions, both for woodturning and for the more graphic arts. Does your league give guidance to entrants for graphic arts?

For example, for one competition I entered, the rules stated (amongst other things): The judges will consider: - the appeal of the design and appropriateness of the materials used, - technical excellence, - originality and difficulty of techniques employed, - quality of finish.

Now, you can argue about which of these represents art and which represents craft. But one could imagine very similar criteria being applied to many different fields.

If you want to give the appearance of objectivity in judging, then allocate a number of points to each category that you want to consider (appeal, excellence, etc) then mark entries in each category and total the scores. Note that if you over-weight on originality and/or difficulty then good "plain and simple - but extremely well executed" entries will never get a placing.

Things must be different there. Jurying for entry is done from two dimensions pretty much everywhere. Slides (If you can get the film!) or photos. It's a way of cutting down the field to a manageable size. Most places I go actual judging is done at the show, some even allow you to tag a work you want judged.

There must be a category or categories to separate the 3-D folks from the paint splashers, because the judges are normally painters and have a predisposition toward similar work. Best of show never goes to wood workers. I've seen a couple go to sculptors of the junkyard persuasion, but overall people who paint or draw do so for a reason - they like it - and it shows. Don't know how often I've heard judges tell me that what I do is a craft, not than an art as they buy a couple of the freehand-carved, one-of-a-kind hand sculptures I sell as spoons, or reserve a salad bowl to be picked up after the judging. After all, they're _useful_ things.

Objective standards for judging? Sure, like craftsmanship points deducted for cracks, finishes that shine, don't, bottoms that go in instead of out .... Can't happen. Puts you in the business of deciding what's style and what's substance, and I would rather not go there. Either that or tells people to "make one of these" to get in your show. What appeals can be filled out in words, so the judges do that for the winners, also-rans never hear, which is the way it should be.

Head of the Art and Design department at the local college once gave a workshop on how to get the ribbons. Her critique of my black ash end-grained bowl with a crotch running through included such meaningful observations as "it has two centers of interest," to describe the knots. She also said "most turnings I've seen in galleries were thinner," than my

3/8 salad bowl. Almost every year I make at least one translucent-thin piece in her memory that I have to put a secondary weight in to keep it from blowing off the display. It's there sometimes a couple years, because nobody wants to buy something so fragile, and they mention it. Diane's bowl.