A Sense of Place 2023
The National Juried Competition A Sense of Place, is open to participants from throughout the United States. The exhibition, in its 41st year as of 2023, sought to recognize the outstanding quality and diversity of work being generated by contemporary American artists. It was on view in the Main Gallery at the Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art September 8–October 13, 2023.
2023 Participating Artists
Karen Abato, Zane Ally, Sierra Bush, Kyle Chaput, Emily Clare, Catherine Conrad, Robyn Cooper, Alyssa Davis, Andrew DeCaen, Diana Dyer, Marie Echols, Michael Farmer, Richard Gilles, Juan Granados, Katrina Griffith, Pattricia Guthrie, Bro Halff, Howard Hastie, Karly Jean Kainz, Devin Lovett, Barbara Mann, John Markowitz, DaNice D Marshall, Timothy McCool, Linda McCune, Gautam Misra, Katy Mixon, Paul Moncus, Jo-Ann Morgan, Jacob Muldowney, Robert Mullenix, Christopher Murphy, Mable Ni, Anna Norton, Jose Ochoa, Judith Peck, Melissa Pinney, Seda Pound, Craig Rouse, Jess Self, Jessie Shinn, Asya Dodina & Slava Polishchuk, Jessica Summers, Patricia Turner, Mike White, Marian Zielinski
Best in Show
Call it Sleep by Judith Peck
Honorable Mentions
Jurors Awards
Juror Statement for "A Sense of Place" — Jeffrey Richmond-Moll
“In 1977, Yi-Fu Tuan famously defined places as "centers of value," where humans transform unbounded space into sites of meaning, where space becomes humanized by the bonds we make with other humans, with the environment, with things larger than ourselves. As I reviewed the submissions to this year's edition of "A Sense of Place," I was struck by the many works that communicate a profound, deeply sensitive, and often highly personal connectedness with our world and with one another. Portraits, landscapes, cartographies, street scenes, still lifes that suggest those places where we are most who we are; the places where life and memory make us "us." In that sense, place is also about time—those stages of life when we knew connection, or when relationship was simpler, purer, more whole, even if only in hindsight. The objects that I selected for this year's exhibition are diverse in subject. The seemingly microscopic architecture and both infinite and infinitesimal structures of nature, pulsing with life or confounding understanding. Images of connections made or undone, family loved or lost, relationships—whether human, visual, geographical, or spatial—hanging in the balance. Images of a fractured self, where the sense of place within one's own body is a fragile equilibrium; pictures of the self-struggling to find place within inhospitable worlds; or the opposite, pictures of the places where we find ourselves and find rest.”
About The Juror: Jeffrey Richmond-Moll
Jeffrey Richmond-Moll is curator of American art at the Georgia Museum of Art and a graduate faculty member at the Lamar Dodd School of Art, University of Georgia. He received his A.B. from Princeton University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Delaware. His research has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies/Henry Luce Foundation, Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Winterthur Museum & Library, among others.
He is the editor and lead author of Extra Ordinary: Magic, Mystery, and Imagination in American Realism (2021) and Reckonings and Reconstructions: Southern Photography from the Do Good Fund (co-published by the Georgia Museum of Art and the University of Georgia Press, 2022). Essays on early American still-life painting, portraiture, neoclassical sculpture, magic realism, ecology and the southern landscape, modernism in the Southwest, and wartime material culture have appeared in numerous journals, including Winterthur Portfolio, the Archives of American Art Journal, and MAVCOR Journal, and in various anthologies and exhibition catalogues, including Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment (2018), The Unforgettables: Expanding the History of American Art (2023), Object Lessons in American Art (2023), and Southern/Modern (2023). Other recent and upcoming exhibition projects include a series of durational video performances about sea level rise (2020), the resurgence of abstraction among contemporary artists (2021), modern Native American printmaking (2021), American modernism on paper (2022), photography in the American South (2022), and intergenerational trauma and reconciliation in the nuclear age through cameraless photographic techniques (2024).
As this event is open to artists from across the United States, the entries represent an extremely wide range of artistic skill and ability. The 413 entries received represented 151 applicants from 33 states. The process to narrow down so many entries was a difficult one and space did play a role. In all, 46 works were chosen for inclusion in the 2023 exhibition representing 19 states.
