Students from Dubuque Senior High School and Hempstead High School have been selected to have their art featured in the Dubuque High Schools Juried Art Show at the University of Dubuque’s Bisignano Art Gallery located within Heritage Center. The public is invited and the show is free of charge.
The exhibition highlights works juried by high school art teachers from Dubuque Senior High School, Hempstead High School, and Wahlert High School. The 14 works in the show are in various media including ceramics, painting, photography, pen and ink, multimedia and weaving.
The juried show was quite successful last year and entering its second year, Bisignano Art Gallery Director Alan Garfield said the show is marked by “real pep, pace, and force that puts the emphasis on story telling”. Garfield credits the success of the exhibit to the coordination between the various art teachers and Cheryl Werner, the school district’s arts coordinator.
In a juried show, the jurors are typically unknown to the artists but this show took a different feel. “We asked the teachers themselves to choose the artwork,” said Garfield. “These are the teachers who instruct and meet with these students on a daily basis. We asked each teacher to operate…not in the capacity of a teacher or an advisor, but as a judge with a bit of psychical distance, if possible. This the teachers did with admirable skill.”
According to Garfield, this show does not purport to demonstrate an aesthetic or direction in art by these 14 students in Dubuque. “Here we have different students with different teachers exploring different content within different media and skill sets,” said Garfield. “And yet we clearly see postmodern visual arts in this show – the notion of a rejection of ‘pure form’ and objective beauty, choosing instead to rely on the fusion of disparate art elements and form.”
The Bisignano Art Gallery is open Monday through Friday, 12:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. and the exhibit runs through February 6.