This year’s annual Permian Basin Juried Art Exhibition is now open and on display to the public at the Ellen Noël Art Museum.
The exhibition, which is on display until Aug. 21, consists of artwork submitted by local artists.
Artists were juried by Diana Kersey from San Antonio.
“Every year, we have a regional show, which is a jury show, where we invite people from the community and submit their work for this show,” Ellen Noël Art Museum Curator Daniel Zies said. “(Kersey) did a wonderful job of selecting work from the amount that we got to fit the theme this year.”
This year, artists were encouraged to explore the theme “from nature.”
“Each year, every since we’ve done this, we’ve had different themes and we give the artists a vague thing that the artist can interpret in their own fashion, so it’s interesting to see what artists were able to come up with in this summer’s theme,” Zies said.
Zies said there were about 160 submissions with about 55 on display.
Those submissions ranged from paintings to 3D prints to photos.
There were nine awards given out by the juror including Best of Show.
This year’s Best of Show winner was James Geitgey for his desert graphic photograph.
Second place went to Mars Woodhill for “Elements of Nature” and third place went to Ernie Wood for his piece titled “Long Ago and Here Today.”
Honorable mentions and student awards were awarded to the rest.
“It was really interesting to see what everyone pulled and did with their entries,” Zies said. “It’s always great when we have people who submit not just paintings. We had a lot of photography submitted and sculpture and we had a couple of 3D works as well.”
Earlier this year, the Ellen Noël Art Museum did a water works exhibition where they put out a call to artists across the country to submit their pieces about water.
“We try to pick themes that are a little vague so that artists can have a large interpretation of what they want to do with that subject matter,” Zies said. “This year, we had a lot of themes. We did that water works exhibition theme. We had another national call for that one and asked artists to do their issues with water. We wanted to continue that on the local level, so that’s why we put nature as that theme. It wasn’t quite the same, but it had that same idea.”
While the award winners for this year’s exhibition may have already been selected, there’s still the People’s Choice Awards that will be awarded at the end of the exhibition for first, second and third and will feature a cash prize of $100 for first, $75 for second and $50 for third.
The People’s Choice Award will be determined by the top three photos that have the most “likes” on the Ellen Noël Art Museum’s Facebook page plus in-person votes. The exhibit can be found online at facebook.com/EllenNoelArtMuseum.
If you go
- What: 2022 Juried Exhibition.
- When: Now-Aug. 21.
- Where: Ellen Noël Art Museum.
