Art on the Green

This last weekend I was down in French Lick, Indiana for the Art on the Green show.  I have been working on my display.  Here are a couple photos of how it looked on Saturday, although it was very windy, so there were certain display pieces that I did not put out.

The highlight of the weekend was that I won 3rd Place in the show:

The part of the weekend I would like to forget was that incident involving my husband and the clown.....

Just kidding!

Booth Shot for the Art Show Jury

Yesterday I spent pretty much all day long working on my booth shot.  Those of you who enter juried shows know that you usually have to submit three pictures of your work and one of your booth.  Sounds easy enough, but it's far from it.  You can't just take a shot of your booth at a show.  Your booth doesn't even necessarily have to be set up in the same layout as a show.  At a show, you set your booth up for the flow of traffic through your booth.  Here you are setting it up so the jury can see it.

If you are reading this as a novice, first of all let me say your tent/canopy must be white.  Most people go to Walmart and buy a cheap one for their first craft show.  They're always some color other than white.  Soon after they always end up having to replace them because almost all art shows require white canopies.  Last fall I happened to score some used Flourish mesh panels for my EZ Up.  (EZ Up gets a bad rap sometimes, but my EZ Up has held up where other, more expensive tents have not.) These panels not only help stabilize the tent, but you can also hang things from them.

Since I have some jury photo deadlines coming up at the end of the month, I have been watching the weather closely.  It has been really cold, and we have had snow on the ground.  Yesterday was my big chance.  My husband, who is the muscle, starting setting up my EZ Up in the morning, and I put in the floor and the display cases.  He had set it up in the driveway, with the door facing the house.  Actually a pretty good idea, I thought, because it's much more secure when I set all the jewelry out.  

What I failed to consider was the location of the sun.  Actually it wasn't that I didn't consider it, I just thought it wouldn't matter inside the tent.  I was wrong.  It was supposed to be cloudy, but by the time we were set up, the occasional cloud that came by was higher in the sky than the sun was.  Up north in the winter, the sun is low in the sky to the south from sunrise to sunset.  Our driveway pretty much faces south, which means the back of my tent was to the sun.  I never realized that the tent does not really block out the sun.  Here is my first shot:

Ok, this looks awful.  I know it.  And it looks even worse in the photo than it does in real life!  You can't see it, but I am shooting right into the sun.  Would you go into this booth?  Probably not.  By the way, this is also the spare EZ Up that came with the sides.  It isn't as clean as my regular one, and you will notice that when it is fully up, the side walls don't reach the ground.  That's ok, because I can fix that in photoshop.  

We have only two of the Flourish panels up, in the rear and the right hand side.  I was planning on hanging a couple of displays on the panels, but once I saw the size of the holes I knew it wasn't going to work.  That's ok, I have a plan B, but it wasn't going to be ready before the end of the day.  No big deal.  This is why you always set things up before you use them, so you don't get any surprises on show day!

My next step was to upload the picture online and get some advice from some other jewelry artists.  Based on their advice, we moved the display cases so they were staged for the picture.  They also suggested I add a rug.  Now I have seen these big rugs, and I have no intention of hauling one of those around.  My husband said he knew of a rug that had just been sitting around in the basement, rolled up since we moved (years ago.)  So we added it.  

After we got the feedback and made the changes, the sun was beginning to go down, and the lighting totally changed.  My DSLR camera was on a tripod, and I put it on a self timer so that there will be no motion from me clicking the shutter button.  That way it can do a long exposure if it needs to.  Here is the last picture I took before editing:

The improvement is amazing.  All we did was rearrange the cases and add the rug.  But the lighting is also a huge improvement.  I love how the rug adds some color, and it's small enough that I can take it to shows.  By the time we got this done the light was fading fast, so this one will have to do.  Here is the final image after cropping and editing:

That is a booth I would go into!  Before next year I hope to add some sheer curtains in the corners to hide  the poles, and three large jewelry photos across the back of the booth.  For now it will have to do.  But we certainly hit the "sweet spot" in the weather because today, as you can see, we got more snow:

For those of you contemplating your own booth shot, I will leave you with a link to Larry Berman's article on the subject:  http://bermangraphics.com/artshows/photograph-booth.htm

Winona Lake Show

I wanted to show everyone my booth at the Winona Lake Show last weekend.  There was a huge storm on Friday night and, being the procrastinator that I am, I was trying to get a lot of things done at the last minute. Then the power went out, so I thought, I'll go to bed and get up early.  When morning came we still didn't have power, or hot water, or not much water at all actually.  It did come on later though, so I did get to jump in the shower at the last minute so I didn't stink up my booth!

So, anyway, here it is.  As you can see we did some serious weights on it.  My husband set it up Friday night before the storm came in and as he left to go camping with the Boy Scouts he said "It's not going anywhere!"  He was right.  Unfortunately a couple of booths did get blown down in the storm, but mine was still standing.

The weather seemed to keep some of the crowds away.  It was supposed to be thunderstorms all day Saturday, but we never had a drop of rain.  Then Sunday was supposed to be nice, but in addition to a little bit of actual rain, it looked like it was going to rain all day.  The people who did show up were great though.

It was a fairly good show in spite of the weather, and I experienced a first for me.  When I checked in, they started telling me about sponsor awards.  I told them it didn't matter, because I sold jewelry so I was never going to get a sponsor award.  Corporations don't buy jewelry to hang on their corporate walls, I explained.  She said you never know, and not all of the sponsors were corporate sponsors.  Sure enough, she was right and I did get a sponsor award.  It wasn't a big one, but I'm not complaining, because I was very pleased just to get one!

So all in all, I'd say it was a pretty good show.

The Jury Process

Last week I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the jury process for the Broad Ripple Art Fair that will take place this summer in Indianapolis.  Broad Ripple is one event whose jury process is open to the public.  The jurying took place at the Indianapolis Art Center, who hosts the Broad Ripple show.  Although I did not apply for the show, I saw this as an opportunity to educate myself on the jury process, and what it takes to get in to the more selective shows.  My husband was nice enough to take the day off for the drive to Indy, and we arrived at the art center a tiny bit ahead of schedule because I wanted to make sure I didn't miss either of the two jewelry categories.

 

The Indianapolis Art Center (from their website)

When I arrived and took my seat in the mostly empty auditorium, the jury was running way behind.  They were currently looking at ceramics.  The judges, I think there were five of them, were seated down front.  The application process was done through Zapp.  Each judge had a laptop on the table in front of them.  From where I was seated, behind the roped off area for spectators, I could see that each entry was shown as a row of 4 pictures across the screen, with other information above or below.  The judge could scroll up or down between the applicants, and enter comments.  Also, the applicants photos were projected on a large screen in front of them.  At the beginning of a category they would quickly go through all the entries on the large screen.  Then they would go through each entry one by one.  Each entry was shown on the screen for 30 seconds as an artist's statement was read.  Each artist had submitted three pictures of his or her work, along with a booth shot.  The 4 pictures were shown at the same time on the screen, in 2 rows of 2, with the booth shot in the lower right hand corner.  Every once in awhile a judge would comment out loud, but from where we were sitting we couldn't hear what was said. 

Even with the ceramics, the thing that immediately struck me was something I had heard before, but didn't always recognize or understand it:  a "cohesive body of work"  Without getting into a whole other blog entry, it means the pieces look alike, same materials, same process.  When the pictures are shown on the screen together, it is much easier to see what this means.  They should be like 3 components of one big picture, 3 pieces to the same puzzle.  It seemed to me that even the colors should be similar.  I also noticed that the three pieces of art, all appearing to be professionally photographed, usually had the same background.  If you are ever in doubt about your "cohesive body of work", put your pictures side by side and look at them as one unit.

The artists statements (or whatever they were called) were not really about the artists, but about their work and the techniques that they use.  Things like: " I grow crystals in my glazes for two weeks", "all hand drawn - no stencils"  This statement is the artist's chance to tell what is special about their work.  Some other bits that I heard (not necessarily pertaining to pottery) were "interaction between humans and nature", "functional, yet a literal piece of art", "all limited edition", "dimensionally arranged", "free-form designs", "inspired by architectural forms"....   However, if there is something special about your process, this is your only chance to convey that to the judges.

Jewelry is the largest category at Broad Ripple, so they have split it into two categories:  metalwork and other.  At some point prior, they had decided in order to save time they were going to show the entries for 20 seconds rather than 30.  I expected to see the occasional crappy entry -- I never saw it.  I did see loads of stunning pieces by very talented artists.  Once again, I saw the cohesive body of work.  When it came to their statements, the jewelers were pretty much all business:  "I make ____ out of ___ using ____ [technique]."  I guess maybe the jewelry artists are so busy explaining their techniques, they don't have time for any of what I call the foo-foo stuff.  All the jewelry appeared professionally photographed and almost exclusively on a graduated grey background.

Booth Shots:  Since the judges don't confide in me, I'm not really sure how important these are, but I can tell you my impressions.  Another artist told me, "they just want to see that your booth looks professional".  In pottery I noticed that booths that had many larger items looked better than booths that had nothing but lots of small items.  That's hard to do in jewelry, however.  What you can do is hang one (or three) large pictures in the back of your booth.  (Blur out any logos in your shot before it is submitted however.)  Almost all jewelry booths used counters with glass (or plexiglass) tops.  Though the art shots were all impressive, I did see some booth shots that looked less than stellar.  Some that looked rather messy.  Though the artists send their work out to be professionally photographed, they can't do the same with their booth, and many times the photos weren't very good.  Another thought, and maybe it's just me, but I think it helps if the booth shot goes with the three art shots, or at least doesn't clash.  This is a highly competitive show, and though some of the artists who received comments about their booths did make it into the show, I would think it could make a difference in whether or not you are invited to participate.

The results of the jury have been posted here:  jury results  If I counted correctly, in the "jewelry, metalwork" category, 21 artists were invited out of 100, or 21%.  In the "jewelry, other" category the numbers were even tougher: 5 out of 47, or not quite 11%.  If you applied for this show and got in: congratulations!  If you applied and didn't get in:  I can honestly say don't take it personally.  These are split second decisions based on what they want for their market and truly not a reflection of the quality of your work.  And if you ever get the chance to sit in on a public jury I would highly recommend it.