Creating the Call for Entries
Topics: Themes Entry Form Collecting Images for Jurying Ethics of Handling Entries |
An exhibit begins with a Call for Entries, which tells the artists what they need to know about submitting an artwork:
Themes At Hope Chapel we almost always set a theme for the exhibits that rotate throughout the year, usually based on the church calendar. Advent and Christmas, Lent, Easter, and sometimes Pentecost get their own themed exhibits. Summer is generally a break time, and the fall exhibit themes vary. Sometimes we present a single artist’s work or coordinate with another church group such as the evangelical team for a special exhibit. Sometimes themes coordinate with a sermon series. At least one exhibit per year at Hope is collaborative – between artists and the church body as a whole or between artists working in different genres. For the biennial Arts Festival, we do not set a theme. Artists have the opportunity to share with us whatever they have been grappling with in their art. Calls for Entries can include quotations or suggestions, and give the artists a lot to think about before they start working. Or they can be brief, leaving the theme wide open. Here is an example of a Call for Entries for a collaboration between visual art and poetry. For collaborative exhibits it is generally a good idea to suggest possible ways to collaborate. In this case the poet could be someone inaccessible to the visual artist (for example, dead) or could be someone s/he knew, or the visual artist and the poet could be the same person (making the word collaboration a bit off the mark, but you get the idea). Entry Form For the rotating exhibits we do not use an entry form. Since the gallery volunteers know the exhibitors and receive the art from them directly, we haven’t had have any problems figuring out which artist did which piece and can get the information for wall labels easily. For the Arts Festival exhibits, however, we receive a lot more entries and many are from artists outside our congregation. For these we developed an entry form that probably drives the artists nuts. Over the years we kept refining the instructions in response to misunderstandings that came up, so it became long. A word about sales. Not all artists want to sell their work, but if they do, HopeArts asks artists to donate 10% of any sale made as a result of our exhibits to the ministry. We do not handle sales directly, nor do we check up on anyone. Art made by the collaborative efforts of artists and the general church body belongs to Hope Chapel, and we usually sell it by auction. This has raised funds for our lighting and hanging systems. Collecting Images for Jurying We do not require artists to submit images of their work for jurying for the rotating exhibits, but the biennial Arts Festival exhibit is juried. File names are crucial to identifying and sorting the images. Labeling instructions are part of the Call for Entries. At HopeArts, we usually use different jurors for two-dimensional and three-dimensional work, so the first part of the file name is “2D” or “3D.” Next comes the artist’s last name, a number that corresponds to the information about the work on the entry form, then the title, and finally an indication whether it is a detail image. Separating the bits of information with underscores makes them easier to read. To keep the file name from getting too long, run the words of the title together and capitalize each word. For example, artist Hezekiah Jones has submitted two paintings, which he has listed as #1 and #2 on his entry form. He has included a detail of Work #1, so there are three images. Here are the three file names: 2D_JonesH_1_NightLandscape.tif 2D_JonesH_1_NightLandscape_detail.tif 2D_JonesH_2_DayLandscape.tif Rahab Smith has submitted photos of one 3-D work taken from two different angles. 3D_SmithR_1_CeramicCup_viewA.jpg 3D_ SmithR _1_CeramicCup_viewB.jpg When we started accepting digital images, not everyone had unlimited bandwidth for sending and receiving large files, so we accepted only CDs, not emailed images. This is really no longer a problem, as long as the artist has reduced the image size of the camera's original file. For more about guidelines for submitting photos, go here. Ethics of Handling Entries Because digital images are so easy to copy, we must handle them ethically. The HopeArts entry form includes the notification that we will use accepted works for “promotional and educational purposes” – in other words, we may put images on our website, use them in promotional print materials, or display them during our services or art talks. If an artist objected to these uses, we would of course honor their wishes. The image resolution we ask for, however, is not high enough for printing at an attractive size, so we could not reproduce them for profit, in a book for example, without getting a new image from the artist. |
Hope and the Visual Arts by Kate Van Dyke is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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