Student Judges Turn the Tables

As you might expect, college art students have several opportunities to submit their work for exhibitions, but there are no guarantees. Sooner or later, they must face rejection of their work. It is just part of learning through experience.

But what happens when the students become the jurors of a contest, deciding what gets in and what gets left out? And what if a few of the entries come from your own professors . . . or your boss?

Well, that’s good experience too and a group of five Radford students recently had that opportunity.

On October 25, Radford University’s Tyler Gallery will host an all student-juried exhibition of art created by the university faculty and staff called Look What We Made!

The jurors--Shiheem Barnett, Anne Cassett, Sam Dent, Tori Hale, and Rachel Zerumsky—all work at Radford’s art museum as work-study students. Their task was to select a full show from 36 entries and 15 artists, plus an overall winner for the “Juror’s Choice Award.”

Four of the five are art majors, which means they knew some of the artists submitting work as their professors. Barnett, a fashion design major, was able to dodge that pressure, but he does work for the museum and one of the submitters is the museum registrar, Theresa Rykaczewski.

In fact, the idea for student jurors came from Rykaczewski, and within a few days of their employment this semester, she reached out to her employees to serve. They could have bowed out, but each person embraced it.

Tori Hale said she accepted because it sounded like fun, but it was also eye-opening.

“Sometimes you forget that people where you live are just as talented as people in big cities,” Hale explained.

“Even with art professors, I don’t really think about them as artists that much. They are teaching us, but they have ideas they want to express.”

The selection process involved two rounds of evaluation and a fair amount of discussion and debate.

Rachel Zerumsky organized the entries, and they flipped through each entry as a group on a large projector screen. Each student jury member used a scorecard to record their individual decisions.

Rykaczewski explained that the jurying took place in the Covington Museum workroom and students had free rein to select as they saw fit without influence from the museum registrar, other staff or faculty.

Ultimately, they submitted confidential scorecards to student gallery assistant, Kendra Earls, to tally and report the results.

Sam Dent said there were some pieces that everyone agreed on easily. Likewise, some were ruled out quickly, specifically large sculptural works, because they would have been nearly impossible to install.

Other pieces were not as simple to select or reject.