Open Call Student Jury Opportunity 2019–20

“I think most if not all of my students loved doing this. They felt like they were really getting involved in the contemporary art world and were doing something with real impact. It also exposed them to some very bad and very good art writing in a shorter form than in the typical readings I give them.”
–William Kaizen, professor of Art History and Media Studies at Northeastern University

Student jurying opportunity
A unique open call for exhibition proposals, two times per year that invites anyone from anywhere to submit a proposal for a group exhibition. Proposals are to be 500 words or less, and no images, links, videos, or CVs are accepted. To jury the proposals, we invite approximately 300–400 individuals from around the world to use an online crowdsourcing system, wherein each juror votes on a subset of randomized proposals. Our signature selection process results in exhibitions that reflect the interests of our audiences near and far.

Participation
Whether as an assignment or an elective, you can specify the number of proposals students review for credit—generally 20–50, according to how much time you wish to devote to voting and how much to subsequent discussion. It takes about 2 hours to read and rate 50 proposals.

Each student is given an individual login through which they review proposals, rating each one on a scale of 1–5.

Classroom benefits
Students gain real world, real time opportunities to evaluate proposals and consider what makes a compelling short essay, while helping to determine next season’s programming. As apexart jurors, they’ll review ideas coming from all around the world—our last open call brought proposals in from 68 countries. Being on the other side of the “grading” process is essential to one’s own understanding the curatorial process, and provides great classroom discussion. The variety of proposals provides valuable insight into which themes and ideas are pressing in local and international considerations.

Details
Provide names and email addresses of participating students and the parameters of the process that work best for you, and then follow your students’ voting in real-time.

We send login information, instructions, and deadline reminders to your students. When you are ready to end the voting and begin discussion, we provide you with a tally page that shows all the votes for your class. This displays the ratings for each proposal given by each student, a copy of the proposal, and the order of its ranking as determined by all jurors.

Many educators have found that serving on an apexart jury encourages lively discussion about many aspects of curating, writing, and exhibition organization including size, location, purpose, and success. To date, more than 41 classes from universities and art schools have participated, including The New School, Node Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard Center for Curatorial Studies, de Appel Curatorial Program, Makere University, and MICA.

As a thank you to all student jurors, we provide a free copy of one of apexart’s e-book publications which cover many diverse issues in the arts.

Visit apexart.org to learn how to submit your proposal to our curatorial open call.

More information can be accessed here or by contacting Lisa Vagnoni, Web Director at lisa.vagnoni [​at​] apexart.org.