All Florida Competition and Exhibition

61st Annual All Florida Juried Competition and Exhibition
May 30 - July 8, 2012

The Museum's All Florida exhibition annually showcases the best prominent and emerging Florida artists working in all media today. As the state's oldest annual juried competition, the Museum's All Florida has introduced the work of thousands of Florida artists - emerging, under-recognized, and established younger and mid-career artists.

Representing a dynamic contemporary cross-section of our state's talent, the 61st All Florida Juried Exhibition reinforces the Museum's commitment to Florida artists, provides professional exhibition opportunities for emerging artists, and reveals a provocative glimpse - through Florida artists' eyes - of the state-of-the-art today.

The juror selected this year’s All Florida and its award winners from more than 1500 entries.

Best in Show went to Vanessa Diaz for her sculpture, The Offering. Merit Awards were given to four artists; Charles Corda for Portrait of an Art Dealer, Beatrice McClelland for Vanishing Environment, Art Siegel for 7th Avenue Local, and Stephanie Jaffe Werner for White Dog Topiary.

The juror for the 61st Annual All Florida was Valerie Cassel Oliver. Valerie is senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston where she has been based since Fall, 2000. Prior to this, she was director of the Visiting Artist Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1996-2000)  and program specialist at the National Endowment for the Arts (1988-1995).  In 1999, she was selected as part of a team of curators that co-organized the 2000 Biennial for the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. She has lectured widely and has published extensively on contemporary art. In 2006, she received a Getty Curatorial Research Fellowship and, was among the ten fellows selected for the 2009 class for the Center for Curatorial Leadership in New York.  In 2010, she was the recipient of the prestigious David Driskell Prize which honors  contributions to the field of African American art and art history.

She is on the advisory editorial board of the journal, Callaloo and functions in an advisory capacity for RxArt (New York) and Charlotte Street Foundation (Kansas City). She is also on the board of directors for Project Row Houses Houston.
 
Cassel Oliver is a graduate from the University of Texas at Austin where she received a BS in Communications in 1987 and; Howard University in Washington, DC, where she earned a MA in Art History in 1992. As a result of her Curatorial Leadership training through CCL, she received a certificate of Executive Education from the Columbia University Graduate School of Business in 2009

The Museum once again utilized the electronic online web-service, CaFÉ, www.callforentry.org to accept all applications. This year over 1,500 artworks by 600 artists were submitted for consideration. The final exhibition entries total 101 works by the following artists: