St Louis Jury Statistics revisited
I've always been an advocate for attending open juries because you can see how your jury images project and compare with your competitor's images. The only thing that's missing at an open jury is getting feedback on your images. Some shows offer what's called a mock or image evaluation jury where a few experienced jurors comment on the images while they are projected in front of a room filled with artists.
Cindy Lerick, the executive director of the St Louis Art Fair, goes out of the way to do everything possible to make applying to her show a learning experience for the artists. This year she released jury feedback and scoring statistics, including thumbnail images by medium category, for each artist that applied.
For the last few years, Cindy has offered a mock jury that takes place a few months before the application deadline for St Louis. Then she lets artists change their application images if they've improved them after getting feedback at the mock jury. I've been one of her mock jurors and have also presented a workshop on photographing artwork in conjunction with the mock jury. So when the jury statistics were released, I wondered if there was a way to figure out the actual value of the mock jury in that how many artists who attended, and then applied and were accepted into the show. Cindy sent me the statistics I asked for and I published an article about it. The numbers are significant.
http://bermangraphics.com/blog/feedback-from-the-jury/
Larry Berman
http://BermanGraphics.com
412-401-8100
Replies
The importance of a mock jury is unquestionably important because there is not a single person out there that could not use constructive feedback. Going to a mock jury is not always possible for many of us because of other commitments, distance, money or whatever reason.
It seems to me that a much needed and valuable service would be to have a group of highly qualified individuals participating in an online mock jury. This could consist a group of rotating jurors that do this on a quarterly or semi-annual basis and would be compensated for their participation with fees paid from artists that value this service enough to pay for it.
Whatta you think?
I think one of the values of a mock jury is in the discussion between the jurors, something difficult to have in an online evaluation. I've always offered free image evaluations but that doesn't compare to three jurors with different opinions discussing the images. And the bigger picture is that other artists can learn from watching and listening not only their images being evaluated, but also the evaluations of their peers.
Larry Berman
http://BermanGraphics.com
412-401-8100