28th Emerald Coast National Juried Fine Arts Exhibit by NWFSCstratcomm

28th

Emerald Coast National Juried Fine Arts Exhibition

MCILROY AND HOLZHAUER GALLERIES AUGUST 29 - OCTOBER 16, 2020

2020 Best in Show Winner

Irene Pentelis

MATTIE KELLY Northwest Florida State College

www.MattieKellyArtsCenter.org | artgalleries@nwfsc.edu | 850.729.6044

28th Emerald Coast National Juried Fine Arts Exhibition About Our Judge Ndubuisi “Endy” Ezeluomba, Ph.D. Francoise Billion Richardson Curator of African Art at the New Orleans Museum of Art

This year’s juror and judge of prizes was the esteemed Ndubuisi “Endy” Ezeluomba, PhD., Francoise Billion Richardson Curator of African Art at the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) where he manages NOMA’s significant collection of traditional African art, which is considered one of the most important in a public museum in the United States. Dr. Ezeluomba began his work at NOMA after serving the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond as the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Research Specialist in African Art. In this role, Ezeluomba collaborated with the institution’s conservation department to probe beneath the surface of the objects in the museum’s collection. Before his time in Virginia, Ezeluomba served as a consultant on the Elusive Spirits: African Masquerades exhibition at the Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida, and worked on the Harn Museum curatorial team that produced Kongo Across the Waters, examining 500 years of cultural exchange between the Kongo, Europe, and the United States, showing the rise of Kongo as a major Atlantic presence and the transmission of Kongo culture through the transatlantic slave trade into American art. Ezeluomba received a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Florida, Gainesville, specializing in historic African shrines. Ezeluomba has contributed to multiple publications and journals, including Routledge Encyclopedia of African Studies, Agents of Space: Eighteenth-Century Art, Architecture and Visual Culture; Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism; Black Art Quarterly; and has presented at numerous international conferences.

Juror Statement Ndubuisi Ezeluomba, August 2020. The 28th Emerald Coast National Annual Juried Fine Arts Exhibition is an assembly of forty works, representing a diverse, exceptional cohort of upcoming artists. This exhibition features notable pieces, including ceramics, sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, and photography. Collectively, the works on view highlight these emerging artists’ exceptional abilities and provide a glimpse into the minds of truly creative, conceptually strong minds. As our world is bedeviled by COVID-19 pandemic, the fallout from the social justice protests that started at the wake of the death of George Floyd in Minnesota and spreading across the globe, we have truly been engrossed with a lot this year. This exhibition serves as the reflection of the career trajectory of the selected works. The works are chosen to reflect upon the current social, political situation that the nation and the world is dealing with. It also looks at the products of these budding artists, who in the next few years will blossom to enviable heights. And no doubt this year’s exhibition showcases artistic styles that fuse traditional skills with contemporary vision. As a curator of African art (historic and contemporary), selecting pieces that demonstrated a relentless determination to realize one’s vision was at the forefront of my mind when choosing the art on view. It was important within this exhibition to represent a well-rounded variety of mediums, conceptual frameworks, and narratives in an effort to engage all of our senses. By doing so, I hope the viewer also explores how within each work of varying media and form, exists a range of roles an artists can have in today’s society. A clear takeaway from this competition is how the artists are not only mere observers and recorders, but also activists, innovators, and creative problem solvers within everyday life.