Works Chosen for Thorne's Jurors' Choice Exhibit
KEENE, N.H. 12/22/08 - Jurors chose artwork by 61 local artists for the 2009 Biennial Regional Jurors’ Choice Exhibition to be displayed Saturday, January 24, to Thursday, February 26, at the Thorne-Sagendorph Art Gallery at Keene State College. The Jurors’ Choice honorees will be announced at a 6 p.m. awards ceremony during the opening reception Friday, January 23, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the gallery. The reception is hosted by Friends of the Thorne, whose members were eligible to submit works for the Juried Competition open to artists living within 30 miles of Keene.
The competition brought 174 artists to drop off 329 works of art at the gallery on a snowy Friday and Saturday, December 12 and 13. Jurors Gail E. Sauter from Kittery, Maine, a master pastelist and a Copley artist, and contemporary artist Bert Yarborough from Hartford, Vt., an associate professor of art at Colby-Sawyer College, culled through the work Monday, December 14, and chose 71 pieces for exhibition ranging from traditional landscape paintings and photographs to contemporary sculptures and montages.
“Ours was a challenging task! The quality of the entries was high, combined with a large number of wonderful pieces,” explained Sauter and Yarborough in a statement that opens the exhibit. “We were impressed by the variety as well as the high technical and conceptual competency of the work. It’s inspiring to see such an outstanding level of professionalism in the region.”
Sauter’s paintings have been exhibited across the United States and in Canada, Great Britain, Italy, France, and Russia. She has been awarded the honorary distinctions of Master Pastelist by the Pastel Society of America, and Copley Artist by the Copley Society, Boston. She has held residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Vermont Studio Colony, I Park, and the Atlin Center. Her work is listed in Who’s Who in American Art and has been published in The Best of Pastel 2 and L’Art du Pastel. She holds a bachelor of fine arts in painting from the University of Oklahoma.
Yarborough has had numerous one-person and group exhibitions in the United States and Japan, and his work is in a dozen art gallery collections. His work most recently was reviewed in the March 2008 issues of Artscope and Art New England. He has received two individual artists’ fellowships in painting from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, a Fulbright Fellowship in Sculpture to Nigeria, West Africa, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant in sculpture. He holds a master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa and a bachelor of arts degree in architecture from Clemson University.
The reception and exhibition will be free and open to the public. For further information about the Regional Jurors’ Choice Exhibition, visit the Thorne website at www.keene.edu/tsag/exhibits.cfm or call 603-358-2720.
