Cherry Creek got approximately 2,400 applications, which translated into 12,000 images which the jurors had to evaluate over three days.

Robert:
Two of the jurors were award winners from last year, one was a curator from a contemporary museum and the fifth was an art critic. Between myself and the other two artists, we knew what an art show was supposed to look like. For example, why some artists set up a certain kind of non standard booth. The booth helps with scale and dimension. Impact factor if it’s a WOW booth. Or; “Oh my God”, the work is so great but they just have things stacked on a table. Also, the booth had to have the current style of work. That was how we used the booth slide.

It was probably the best art experience I’ve ever had, being able to appreciate such great art and knowing personally how hard artists work to create it and the phenomenal quality of the show. It was so thrilling to know that there was an organization out there that has such high integrity, does everything right, thinks about every single detail for artists by artists. It was exciting.

The best thing to do is create great art. Then get a good photographer to photograph it correctly. The main problem with artists who did not get in was the inconsistency of their work, the quality of their images and the matching of their booth image to the work. As long as the work had great flow, it had credibility because it was obvious that the artist was thinking about a theme and the body of work matched. It was obvious that the work wasn’t from different years or different photographers. The main thing that stood out was the consistency in the quality of the images and the background color.

The biggest problem causing someone to get bumped, because the competition was so tough, was if there was a mismatch of backgrounds we couldn’t figure out if it were old work, new work, not important work, or more important work. So truly have a full body of work that matches because the jurors only have a few seconds to judge whether something is apparently good on the screens.

During the projection of the images, the committee continuously stressed that we look up at the screens to evaluate the work, not at the computers. Each picture was projected huge, approximately five feet square and the five images across filled a 25 foot wide wall. If there were any questions, we could stop and enlarge the image to evaluate detail, which we actually did a great deal to answer questions about the work right away. The committee controlled the equipment expertly so if one image was in question, we didn’t have to see all five enlarged. I was not a ZAPP lover before this but now I now think it’s an incredible way to view jury images.