The Columbus Arts Festival is an A-tier show held in downtown Columbus, Ohio in early June. Their jury process is a two-day affair and is open to the public. Five paid jurors view projected artwork and booth images on five large screens, and each juror has a laptop where they can view thumbnail images and supporting information and mark their scores. Each year the show receives in the neighborhood of 1100-1200 applications.
Last year I attended Day 1, when the jury slogs through all of the image sets, seeing each artist's 5 images projected simultaneously. Last year the images were shown for just 3 seconds before switching to the next set. I'm still unclear how a juror could see each of the images, make a Yes-No-Maybe decision, and select their decision on their laptop all within 3 seconds, but time marched on and by the end of the day all the apps had been seen.
This year I attended Day 2. As an aside, due to time-wasting computer glitches on the first day, the last category -- painting -- still needed to go through round 1 so the day started with that leftover task. I noticed that this year each slide set was projected for about 5 seconds rather than 3, and from my perspective that extra time made a big and welcomed difference. It was much easier to really see and absorb the work.
On to Round 2. At the beginning of each category a staff member read the definition/requirements of the category (as listed in the prospectus) and gave both the number of original entries and the number of remaining entries after Day 1's jurying. In almost every case about half of the category remained for the second round.
This time the images were projected for about 10 seconds (what a luxury!) and the artist statement was read aloud. Although the jurors were permitted to discuss what they were seeing, they didn't do so. I had heard that in past years sometimes a juror would either advocate for a particular artist's work or try to dissuade others from accepting an artist, but I didn't see any of that. The jurors were instructed to assign a rating of 1-7 for each artist, with no 4, and with 7 being the best. Scores were not announced.
I noticed that there's definitely a difference from year-to-year in the overall flavor of the work being entered and also in the work each set of judges likes. Not sure what to do with that info, rather than to think that here's yet another area where luck plays a role in whether you're accepted or not. Who's to know who's applying, what they're entering and what the judges will put through?
Finally, if jurors noticed that an artist had entered in the wrong category -- presumably to get a better shot at acceptance or perhaps purely by mistake -- the artist was disqualified. They were not reassigned to the appropriate category and juried there. The artist statement (or "techniques and materials") is the giveaway. If you're in mixed media, you'd better mention materials in several mediums as it's not always obvious by looking at the image.
The second round took about 3.5 hours to jury 500 +/- applications.
