| The Red Clay Survey: Contemporary Southern Art--Part I |
The Huntsville Museum of Art, along with the Huntsville Art League, established the Red Clay Survey, a juried competition for amateur and professional artists in the Southeastern United States, in 1988. The show is intended to showcase the artistic talents of the South. States eligible for the competition are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.
The show is held in Huntsville every two years. In 1996, the Huntsville Museum of Art became the sole sponsor of the event. "Every year the event becomes better known, more popular, and more competitive," says Peter J. Baldaia, Chief Curator for the museum. Baldaia is the one who selects the lone juror for the Red Clay Competition. He looks for someone with strong national credentials, is a practicing artist, has had curatorial experience, and has taught at the university level. Getting someone with most or all of these qualities is a challenge. For the 2000 competition, Benny Andrews was chosen. The Red Clay Survey will be showing at the Huntsville Museum of Art now through January 28, 2001.
Artists in the South are invited to send slides of up to three of their works. For the latest show, over 1,000 slides from 300 artists were received. They were then mailed to Andrews in New York. The slides are sent as a blind study for selection. This means that Andrews was not given the names of the artists and had no idea where they were from or how many works each artist had entered into the competition. This makes for a more objective selection. From the slides, the Juror selected between 100-125 pieces. The artists were notified and required to deliver the actual work to the museum. Then later, Barry Andrews flew into Huntsville and viewed the art which had been set up downstairs in the museum. Some of the pieces were not of the quality that the slides had suggested and were rejected and returned to the artists. In the end, Andrews selected 63 works from 57 artists. Only seven artists had two of their pieces selected to be in the show. None of the artists had all three entries selected. Twenty artists were from Alabama, and 11 of those were from North Alabama. Baldaia said that that was not unusual because more entries are received from Alabama.
Once the selections are made, the museum has the work of mounting the exhibit, photographing the works, and producing the catalog to accompany the exhibit. All in all, it takes about a year of work to unveil the Red Clay Survey exhibit.
Artists
in the Red Clay Survey
A
Photo Tour of The Red Clay Survey
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