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. Here's the article I wrote about it:
http://bermangraphics.com/blog/feedback-from-the-jury/
Here's the statistics:
Larry Berman
http://BermanGraphics.com
412-401-8100
Comments
That is about 12% acceptance. We all really have to be on top of our game to survive and thrive.
Hi Ray, Weren't those statistics in the information Cindy sent to all the artists who had applied this year?
I just looked it up. 155 artists made it through the last round and 1281 artists applied.
Larry Berman
http://BermanGraphics.com
412-401-8100
The importance of a mock jury is unquestionably important because there is not a single person out there that could not use constructive feedback and assistance. 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 individual jurors 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.
I would most certainly pay for this service...
I realize this would not be as effective as being there in person and getting feedback from all the jurors...but it sure does seem like a good alternative for many others and a possible source of income for someone organizing these online jurors.