The sixty photographers that will participate in the 26th Juried Exhibition are:
Terry Barczak, Ken Beckles, Anne Berry, Jen Bilodeau, Christa Blackwood, Sally Bousquet, Cody Bratt, Judy Brown, Annette Burke, Jo Ann Chaus, Sarah Christianson, Richard Cohen, Cathy Cone, Margo Cooper, Benjamin Dimmitt, Yvette Marie Dostani, Yorgos Efthymiadis, Madge Evers, Nicholas Fedak II, Fehmida Chipty, Dennis Geller, Carol Glauber, Kylie Harrigan, Bootsy Holler, Leslie Jean-Bart, Rachel Jessen, Paul Johnson, Loli Kantor, BK Kelley, Lee Kilpatrick, Sandra Klein, David Kulik, Eric Kunsman, Molly Lamb, Jeff Larason, JK Lavin, Rhonda Lopez, Margaret McCarthy, Lisa McCord, Yvette Meltzer, Nancy Nichols, Dale Niles, George Nobechi, Scott Offen, Karen Olson, David Oxton, Astrid Reischwitz, Eleonora Ronconi, Susan Rosenberg Jones, Claudia Ruiz Gustafson, Sara J. Winston, Geralyn Shukwit, Aline Smithson, Neelakantan Sunder, Jerry Takigawa, JP Terlizzi, Sandra Chen Weinstein, Bruce Wilson, Caren Winnall and Dianne Yudelson.See a video of the Gallery Walk ThroughAWARDS:
$1,500 Arthur Griffin Legacy Award – Leslie Jean-Bart
$1000 Griffin Award – Astrid Reischwitz
$500 Richards Family Trust Award – Bruce Wilson
$100 Honorable Mentions (10) – Ken Beckles, Christa Blackwood, Cody Bratt, Dennis Geller, Rachel Jessen, Margaret McCarthy, Nancy Nichols, Dale Niles, Eleonora Ronconi and Jerry TakigawaWe will award 4 exhibitions that will take place next June and July 2021 – Vicky Stromee and Stefanie Timmerman/ Vaune Trachtman and Jacqueline Walters
We will award 1 Director’s prize that will result in a catalog and exhibition –  Sarah Schorr
We will produce a catalog of the 26th Juried Exhibition. – View catalog here.
We will produce an online exhibition from photographs not chosen by the juror and it will run on Instagram as well. It will also run on a computer in the gallery during the exhibition.  View here.
We will award a Member in Focus – Nancy A. Scherl
We will award one Purchase Prize – Scott Offen.

JUROR: Alexa Dilworth

JUROR’S STATEMENT
I was honored to be asked to jury the 26th annual exhibition at the Griffin Museum of Photography, and what a deep pleasure, especially in these unusual times, it has been to lose myself in looking at and thinking about photographs. And what a hard task to select so few images—only sixty. There were so many striking, engaging, and just plain beautiful photos; it hurt to eliminate images with which I’d formed an attachment. In the end, I think the times influenced my eye, as well as an interest in having photographs by different artists be in conversation with each other: some of that back and forth happened through echoes/resonances of composition, tone, light, and some through interconnected relationships to historical or conceptual image making. A theme that emerged for me in looking, and looking again (each day brings new insights right now), was the notion of presence.

I chose Leslie Jean-Bart’s photograph, “The Prayer,” for the Arthur Griffin Legacy Award, because it spoke to reality and imagination, and to presence, how tenuous it is. The image reveals something that only the camera can see—the “pink” figure is being erased by movement and time. Here and also not here. The solid figure in the foreground isn’t firmly fixed, as prominent, as set, as it seems. The wind is agitating the man’s robe; he isn’t stable either.

Astrid Reischwitz’s diptych from her series Inheritance is the Griffin Award recipient. I was taken by the way the images at left and right speak to modes of existence—how the most seemingly prosaic exteriors are beautiful if seen with a certain sympathy, and how they shelter lives both lyrical and ordinary, like all of ours. Lives that contain (house) private histories and profound feelings, of loss, regret, loneliness, that often go unshared.

“For Larry” by Bruce Wilson receives the Richards Family Trust Award, as it encapsulates so much of our new, unprepared for, reality of social distance as necessity. The image is full of warmth, and what’s now so (chillingly?) familiar: the bottle of hand sanitizer, the bag left on a table. Here, presence is absence.

The photographs and photographers that I’ve named as honorable mentions look to the past and are strangely prescient, speak to the raw and the sublime, and require careful consideration as images—they call our attention to not only what they mean but how they’re made, how they mean.

I cannot thank enough the many artists who submitted photographs for the competition. Their images soothed my soul and gave me much to ponder. I learned a lot about how context influences how we see and understand pictures, and how single images by different artists have the ability to create new narratives, so many possible conversations. And I especially thank Paula Tognarelli for the privilege.

JUROR BIO: Alexa Dilworth is publishing director and senior editor at the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University, where she also directs the awards program, which includes the CDS Documentary Essay Prize in Writing and Photography and the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize, and the DocX lab. In 1995 she was hired by CDS to work on the editorial staff for DoubleTake magazine. She was also hired as editor of the CDS books program at that time and has coordinated the publishing efforts for every CDS book, including the recent and forthcoming books Road Through Midnight: A Civil Rights Memorial by Jessica Ingram; Where We Find Ourselves: The Photographs of Hugh Mangum, 1897–1922, edited by Margaret Sartor and Alex Harris; Test of Faith: Signs, Serpents, Salvation: Photographs by Lauren Pond; Reality Radio: Telling True Stories in Sound, Second Edition, edited by John Biewen and Alexa Dilworth; and Aunties: The Seven Summers of Alevtina and Ludmila: Photographs by Nadia Sablin. Dilworth has a BA and an MA, both in English, from the University of Florida, and an MFA in creative writing (poetry) from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa.

PROGRAMMING: Alongside the Juried Exhibition, the Griffin Museum will organize a series of professional development workshops presented by a diverse range of thought leaders. These workshops will share instrumental ideas, methods and tools to help build the business and legal foundation of a thriving artistic practice.

The gallery exhibition at the Griffin Museum is from July 18 – August 30, 2020

The opening reception is Saturday, July 18, 2020 @ 5 PM (It will be a virtual reception.)

Info to come on what our programming will be. See our website for details in programming/events.