Sadly, installation of the 2020 Juried Student Exhibition has been suspended this year due to the coronavirus. The exhibition will be posted on the NCECA website as well as social media in the coming months. The exhibition catalogue is available, printed on demand and you can see the exhibition and purchase a copy here.
2020 Jurors:
Salvador Jiménez-Flores
“First of all, I would like to thank all the students who summited an application to the 2020 NCECA Juried Student Exhibition. I applaud everyone for applying and believing in your work. It is a privilege and a responsibility to be part of the jury committee. This has allowed me to see a survey of the wonderful work that is being created in ceramics nationally. The task of a juror is not easy, one needs to go through hundreds of images and artists’ statements and our goal is to select a few pieces that stick out aesthetically, conceptually, and technically well crafted. Additionally, we need to select pieces that reflect the contemporary clay community. For this jury selection I shared the platform with Virginia Scotchie, we are both artists and educators with different backgrounds and experiences. Naturally we didn’t agree on everything but we were open and learned from one another and agreed on the final selection. From my perspective, the role of a juror is not just about selecting what one likes or dislikes but rather is to be open to the wide range of conventional and unconventional ways artists approach ceramics. If you made it into the show, don’t get comfortable keep creating and continue to push your work forward. If you did not make it into the show, do not get discouraged use this energy to create more work, reflect on your work, and continue to apply for this and other opportunities. Always believe in your work and the message you want to project as an artist and do it. A huge thanks to Ashlyn Pope, Kate Vorhaus, Eliza Weber, Brett Binford, and Joshua Green for their support throughout the process.”
Salvador Jiménez-Flores is an interdisciplinary artist born and raised in Jalisco, México. He explores the politics of identity and the state of double consciousness. Jiménez-Flores addresses issues of colonization, migration, “the other,” and futurism by producing a mixture of socially conscious installation, public, and studio-based art. His work spans from drawing, ceramics, prints, and mixed media sculpture. Jiménez-Flores has presented his work at the National Museum of Mexican Art, Grand Rapids Art Museum, Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and Museum of Art and Design amongst others. He served as Artist-In-Residence for the city of Boston, Harvard Ceramics Program, Office of the Arts at Harvard University, and Kohler Arts Industry. Jiménez-Flores is a recipient of Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grants and The New England Foundation for the Arts. He is an Assistant Professor in ceramics at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Virginia Scotchie
I very much enjoyed this opportunity to serve as one of the jurors for the 2020 National Ceramic Exhibition of Student Work. It is always refreshing to see what is happening in the studios of contemporary students in ceramics and to observe how the concepts, technology and processes of ceramics are changing and evolving over time. It was wonderful to view so many works from student ceramic artists who have a vast range of processes and styles, which highlight the immense diversity in the ceramic community. I asked myself a number of questions as I looked at each work; did the work have visual impact, was the work well composed and well designed? What was the work about, did the artist seem to have a clear sense of what they were communicating and what the work was expressing? It was hard to choose from so many excellent student works submitted.
I would like to thank my fellow Juror and the NCECA Board Members for their hard work in organizing the exhibition and arranging the digital viewing of the images for us to do our part as jurors. I would like to commend all the artists for entering this exhibition. Making art is hard…. taking the next steps to get your work out in the world and entering exhibitions is hard. I encourage all the artists who entered the exhibition to never stop working, exploring, and getting your work out into the world.
Virginia Scotchie, is Head of Ceramics at the University of South Carolina School of Visual Art and Design in Columbia, South Carolina . She holds a BFA in ceramics from University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and completed her MFA at Alfred University in New York. Exhibited throughout the United States and abroad, Scotchie has received numerous awards including the Sydney Meyer Fund International Ceramics Premiere Award from the Shepparton Museum (Australia) and the Visual Art Award from SouthArts for 2019. She has lectured internationally and been an Artist in Residence in Taiwan, France, Italy, China, Australia, Denmark and the Netherlands. Her work is in numerous public and private collections including the Yingge Ceramics Museum (Taiwan) and the FuLe International Ceramic Art Museums (China) and the Asheville Art Museum in her home town of Asheville, North Carolina. Scotchie’s sculptural ceramics are abstracted from domestic objects and pottery, often considering the relationships between multiple parts to pieces into what she envisions as a middle ground between the concrete reality of things made and their resulting meaning.
