Potential picassos?

Manitoba Society of Artists Juried Competition steals show

WILLIAM O’DONNELL

Seventy-five years is a long time by most standards. Well, the Manitoba Society of Artists has been hosting an annual juried competition and exhibition since 1926, only a few years going without.

Despite the apparent enormity of such a number, there is nothing special to mark this year’s event. As former MSA president and event chair Les Dewar put it, “The competition hasn’t changed much through the years.”

There are two jurors for this year’s event: one juror has been selected from outside the province and the other from within. The first juror, Jennifer Macklem, is a Montreal-born artist whose education and artistic projects have taken her across the country and the globe. The second, Jennifer Gibson, who works at the University of Winnipeg, has overseen numerous lucrative galleries and served on many art boards. Dewar points out that MSA’s juried event has undergone a major change, going from a single juror to two.

This event is a chance for both professional and amateur artists to compete, as it is open to submissions from any resident of Manitoba who is over the age of 16. (Note: the submission period for this year’s event has closed.) Such open standards allow for many unknown talents to get their work seen in a formal setting.

This year 195 works of art were entered by 86 different artists. The aforementioned jurors chose 94 of those pieces to be in this year’s show. $1,600 in awards has been delivered to winning artists such as Annette Lowe from Winnipeg who took First Award for her oil work “Pale Girl”; Lois Hogg, also from Winnipeg, received Second Award for her mixed media piece “Surreal Identities.”

The MSA has a long history of granting opportunities to Manitoban artists. Never mind the mere 75 times that the Juried show has occurred, the MSA itself is over 105 years old! Since 1902, this organization, which was founded by Manitoban arts enthusiasts, has helped form a provincial art institute, an art school, and a municipal art gallery among other things. As explained by Dewar, MSA’s mission is to help promote and encourage Manitoba’s visual artists by providing memberships to professional artists, enabling them to participate in members’ exhibitions and various other annual functions.

Such opportunities provided by the MSA should be considered by the talented artists coming out of our very own campus. I am aware that some do not wish to join organizations or already have strong ties to particular galleries. By allowing non-professional submissions, MSA events could kindle the interest of the more timid or unlikely artist out there.

It is refreshing to see an organization devoted to something that is so strangely overlooked by many. Some people I have spoken to have not even heard of this organization, despite its age. I’d go off on a pseudo-political, bloated tangent about the YouTube generation, but that is better left for another time and place.

Don’t be like me kids, for I have yet to personally experience the MSA Juried Competition — though I plan to make amends for this by composing a follow-up article in which I will detail my first-hand experience of my imminent attendance of the event.

Another event of theirs, which is celebrating its sixth year in 2007, is the MSA hosted Manitoba Art History Conference. This year’s conference will be held on Oct 20, 2007 and will return each fall hereon.

This MSA Juried exhibition began on the of June 10 and runs until August 15. The show is set up at the Vault Gallery, located at 2181 Portage Ave, and is open Tuesday to Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m..