Artists have fragile egos. We work for hours, days, months (even years?) on a piece. "A masterpiece," we think. "This will get into that upcoming juried show for sure," we think. Only to check our email or show up at the jurying location to find out it wasn't selected. Suddenly our elation changes to, "Ok, not a masterpiece. In fact, no good at all. What was I thinking?" Try as we might, we cannot keep those thoughts from invading and we suddenly lose confidence in ourselves and our abilities. There is no artist on earth, no matter how celebrated and successful, who has not been rejected from a juried show. We are all in good company. Take, for instance, Mary Cassatt: those lucky enough to visit the Cassatt/Degas exhibit at the National Gallery in Washington DC will no doubt remember this beautiful painting, "Little Girl in a Blue Armchair"
Mary was clearly very pleased with this painting, and entered it into the Art Gallery of the American Pavillion at the 1878 World's Fair, where it was rejected. Mary was not happy. In a 1903 letter to her Parisian art dealer, Ambroise Vollard, she said:
"It was the portrait of a friend of M. Degas. I had done the child in the armchair and he found it good and advised me on the background and he even worked on it. I sent it to the American section of the big exposition [of 1878], they refused it ... I was furious, all the more so since he had worked on it. At that time this appeared new and the jury consisted of three people of which one was a pharmacist!"
Even a painting worked on by both Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas was rejected from a show; in fact, the impressionists were often rejected from the great Parisian art shows. Although most shows these days are juried by - ahem - actual working artists rather than pharmacists, there is still quite a bit of head-scratching that goes on when artists find out what did - and did not - get into a given show.
Mary's painting was eventually accepted into multiple shows. Gallery Underground member Jane McElvany Coonce, a teacher for more than 30 years, loves to tell her students this story: she entered a painting into a monthly juried show over and over, only to have it rejected each time. She really believed in this painting, so undaunted, she thought, "Ok, I'll give it one more try," This time, the painting was not only accepted, it won Best in Show. And one of Gallery Underground's recent jurors, Mark Cameron Boyd, told the story at our opening reception of having had a painting rejected from a show by a juror only to have that same juror accept it into a subsequent show!
So, we as artists have to remind ourselves that often a "rejection" may have to do with a juror's mood on any given day, what they had for lunch, or a color they hate rather than the artist's talent. The good news is that there is always another juried show. And one after that.
--Sandi Parker, Gallery Underground Co-Director
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