Jurors
As the largest juried art competition in Louisiana, Art Melt goes to great lengths to select a panel of three professional jurors. Each year, we select one national juror from outside the southeast, one regional juror from outside south Louisiana and one local juror from south Louisiana. The pool from which jurors are selected consists of art professionals such as museum curators and accomplished members of the art community who are not affiliated with show participants. No current or previous members of the Art Melt committee or Forum 35 are permitted to serve as jurors. These principles secure a jury that upholds the duty to establish a fair and professional environment in which Louisiana artists can compete.
The pieces submitted will be presented blindly and independently to our jury. Each submission will be ranked on a scale of 1-7 by each juror and then cumulatively ranked based upon overall ranking by all jurors. The number of pieces to hang in show will then be determined by availability of space.
Local juror: Jordana Pomeroy, executive director of the LSU Museum of Art
The Executive Director of the LSU Museum of Art since 2012, Jordana Pomeroy received her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College and her Ph.D. from Columbia University. Pomeroy worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum and was, until recently, the chief curator at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, where she organized many notable exhibitions. Among these include: An Imperial Collection: Women Artists from the State Hermitage Museum (2003) and Italian Women Artists from Renaissance to Baroque (2007) to Nordic Cool: Hot Women Designers (2004). Her book Intrepid Women: Victorian Artists Travel (Ashgate, 2005) was critically well received. Pomeroy has published widely on the subject of British patronage of the arts in the early 19th century. She was a member of the inaugural class of the Center for Curatorial Leadership, a management program for leaders ini the curatorial profession, based in New York and sponsored by philanthropist Agnes Gund.
Regional juror: Susan Edwards, executive director and CEO of the Frist Center for the Visual Arts
Susan Edwards has served as Executive Director and CEO of the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee since 2004. During her tenure, the Frist Center was awarded accreditation by the American Alliance of Museums and has presented more than one hundred critically acclaimed and popular exhibitions. Those exhibitions range from the international gem The Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces form the Musée d’Orsay to an exhibition of photographs by a world-renowned Memphis artist William Eggleston: Anointing the Overlooked to the Frist-organized Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video which is on tour nationally until 2014.
Edwards earned BA and MA degrees at the University of South Carolina and a Ph.D. from the City University of New York Graduate Center. She is an acknowledged expert in American art and photography, has organized exhibitions, published and lectured widely on modern and contemporary artists, material culture, and photography. She has also taught these subjects at New York University, Queens College/CUNY, School of Visual Arts, New York, and Vanderbilt University.
National juror: Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, executive director of the Frye Art Museum
Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker is Director of the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, WA and former Director of the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich, Germany, and the Vancouver Art Gallery in Canada. She served as exhibition director or curator of numerous exhibitions at these institutions and at the Kunsthal Rotterdam; Deutsche Guggenheim and the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the International Center of Photography, MoMA PS1, and the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York. A specialist in the history of the modern, Birnie Danzker has published extensively on art of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. At the Frye Art Museum she curated both historical and contemporary exhibitions including the Munich Secession and America (2009), Séance: Albert von Keller and the Occult (2010), Gabriel von Max: Betailed Cousins and Phantasms of the Soul (2011), Issac Layman – Paradise (2011), Mw [Moment Magnitude] (2012), and Nicolai Fechin (2013)
