We are excited to announce the 2020 VCUarts Undergraduate Juried Exhibition, November 6–20, at the Anderson. As in recent years, the 2020 exhibition will be organized around a juror-generated call and submissions will be received electronically, via Google Form. We remind you that the Undergraduate Juried Exhibition is open to undergraduate students from all VCUarts Departments, working in any media or discipline – or combination thereof! Students may submit existing work, but are also strongly encouraged to create new works in response to the call.
The juror for the 2020 exhibition is Anna Katz, Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (See “About the Juror” below for full bio.)
The Call:
FAKE NEWS
Much of the art of the recent past has taken up postmodernism’s critique of metanarratives, offering instead multiple histories and herstories and contending that “truth” is a construction contingent on cultural meaning and subjective experience. In the so-called “post-truth world” that we now occupy, we are compelled to ask what is, or ought to be, art’s relationship to reality, illusion, and fact? Does art have the capacity, or even the responsibility, to burst filter bubbles in an effort to regain a sense of shared reality? What can art help us understand about the reasons that objective facts have become less influential in shaping public opinion, while appeals to emotion and personal belief have become more influential? This call invites the submission of artwork that addresses questions of medium, such as photography’s status as a documentary medium; engages modalities such as parody, satire, fantasy, futurism, and science fiction; takes seriously the phenomena of “truth decay,” “alternative facts,” and the rise of social media and its bots, trolls, climate change deniers, and holocaust revisionists; considers the complexities of identity, such as the fiction of “race” as a biological category and the non-fiction realities of systemic racism; evaluates the relationship of reason and emotion, the weight of feelings, the value of perceptions, and the significance of subjective experience; pursues fields of inquiry including current events, public opinion, the archive; deals in trompe l’oeil and illusionism; and/or participates in the longstanding notion of the artist as trickster, among many other possible topics of artmaking in the age of “fake news.”
Submission period is 9/16–9/23.
For detailed timeline and instructions please visit the submission form:
Questions can be directed to: theanderson@vcu.edu.
About the Juror:
Anna Katz is Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), where she is currently organizing the first West Coast survey of Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist. Recent exhibitions at MOCA include With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985, the first full-scale, scholarly survey of the Pattern and Decoration movement, which travels to the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, in 2021; Give and Take: Highlighting Recent Acquisitions (2018); and Peter Shire: Naked Is the Best Disguise (2017). From 2015 to 2017 Katz was the Wendy Stark Curatorial Fellow at MOCA, during which time she organized the museum’s public programs. Previously a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art from 2008 to 2013, she holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University. Her doctoral dissertation is the first book-length study of sculptor Lee Bontecou’s oeuvre during the most active period of her production, 1958 to 1971. Katz has taught art history courses at UCLA, Pratt Institute, Occidental College, and Pomona College.
DESIGN BY LIHUA YU