With excitement electrifying the air of Building C’s art gallery, a circle of attendees gathered around fine arts professor Perry Pollock as he began to announce the winners of this semester’s Student Juried Exhibition. Though neither gallery director Jason Peot nor this year’s featured juror Angela Piehl – a professional artist and educator at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee – were able to attend, those who were in attendance were no less eager to hear the results.
In the end there were six winners: Olive Maliszewski, Aleks Tsurupa, Vasumathi Urs-Juffa, Jackie Berta, Layne Dennis and first place winner Cat Reddington.
The awards were provided by Harper Educational Foundation, more specifically from funds like the Sue L. Schultz Memorial Endowment and the Renee Windell Danforth Endowment, as well as a portion of the school’s liberal arts division budget.
Though she wasn’t there in person, Pollock explains that the part of the appeal to students who submit their art is the opportunity to catch the eye of an experienced artist like Piehl, who chose 29 out of the 172 total submissions displayed at the Exhibition.
“We always bring in a juror from outside Harper. It’s an art professional, it could be a professor at a university, it could be a gallery owner, or somebody who has a full time profession in the art world,” Pollock said. “The juror is selected by us more specifically by Jason Peot who runs the gallery currently. Often we use a prior visiting artist who has come to the school to put on an exhibition and critique students work and have some interaction with students. And this was usually the case and this was the case this time.”
For the finalists, the juror typically picks two awards, while faculty members pick about three or four other students. Submissions are open to all students, both art majors and non-art majors. The rules for work submitted is that the piece must have been created when the artist was a student in high school or college, and that students can submit up to three pieces in total.
Each winner gets a cash award as a prize. Pollock believes they’re really fortunate to be able to get prizes like these and that they have very strong support in the larger community around Harper.
Cat Reddington, 22, has an associate’s degree in fine arts through Harper College, and had been taking a couple classes for fun at Harper College. Next thing he knew, he found himself submitting a piece for the art exhibition and was one of the two students the juror had chosen.
“I’m insanely thrilled! I was very happy,” Reddington said with a big smile. “I was very nervous about submitting a piece because, I don’t know: I have a lot of social anxiety.”
It was his first time doing an exhibition, and according to him the results were a complete shock. It had taken him just a little under nine hours to create the piece that would eventually win first place, but just like everyone else he has his own struggles within the process: artist’s block!
“I tend to fall into art block a lot. Last year was awful. I couldn’t make any pieces at all: like I would have one thing that I wanted to work on and I would work
on it for like an hour one day and then not at all for months, which was really bad,” Reddington said. “So starting this year I got back into it, obviously – I’m taking classes and that helped me a lot, and I realized that traditional [art] can help make sketches a lot easier.”
His usual process is to force himself to draw everyday or otherwise he feels as though his skills will get rusty. However, although asking for advice does give him some degree of anxiety, he also tries to get as much feedback as he can from peers, professors or parents.
When he thought about his long term goals he laughed and smiled then said, “I’d love to make a couple comic books. I’m not there yet, but I will get there!” His overall inspiration comes from manga, which is a huge part of his life as well as American cartoons — but it was taking classes at Harper that helped him do projects that he never thought to do on his own.
