Overdue Notice

I was beginning to wonder about the Hunterdon Juried Show that I submitted work to back in March. Notices were to go out a week ago, but days passed with no notification. There were a number of possibilities to explain this. Sometimes the juror has to postpone for illness or something. The major storm last week could have caused problems, as the museum is a former 19th century mill building sitting right on a river, and rivers all over the north east were flooding for days. Another possibility was that sometimes galleries send the acceptance letters out first, then get around the the rejections later. I don't know if either of the first two happened, but when the return envelope finally arrived today, I was hit with the third. I'm a bit mystified here- hard to believe that a print that was considered the best work of art out of over 150 entries in Belmar last month wasn't considered at least in the top several dozen or so that made the cut. And the other two were pretty good prints, too. Well, at least this saves me from making multiple trips all the way up to Clinton for drop off/reception/pick up. As for the future, the new regime is picking terrible jurors, so I'll skip this show from now on unless they bring in a juror I know will give me a fair shot.

And speaking of jurors, yesterday my mail included the prospectus for the next juried show at PCNJ, the latest Small Impressions show, which is being juried by Nancy Einreinhofer from the Ben Shahn Galleries at William Paterson University. She's on my good list- I was included in the first 5 juried print shows in her space, including winning 2 purchase awards, before a juror finally left me out last year. In addition, she pushed me to submit some slides when she was curating a book arts show in 2002, even though it's not really my speciality, and ended up making me one of the four specially featured artists, giving me a whole wall to show 18 Ecclesiastes prints. Jurying is typically blind, so it's not like my name on an entry would help me in this case, but she is predisposed to like my work, so I would think there's a good chance that as a juror she would select my work. The problem is that I don't do many small prints. At the moment I have one eligible piece, and I don't know if I'd do anymore before the deadline on June 3. The prospectus is available to download on the home page of the PCNJ website.