34th Annual Decatur Fine Arts Exhibition: “Small Changes”

Presented by the Decatur Arts Alliance
Decatur, Georgia
May 4 – June 16, 2023 

The Decatur Arts Alliance invites artists working in 2-Dimensional and 3-Dimensional media to participate in the 34th Annual Decatur Fine Arts Exhibition, a juried multimedia presentation that contributes a fresh and unique perspective in conjunction with the Decatur Arts Festival. For this year’s exhibition, the theme is “Small Changes,” so entries must be no larger than 24 inches in any direction, including framing.

The Decatur Arts Festival draws approximately 60,000 people to downtown Decatur for a celebration of the arts that includes a juried Artists Market, Children’s Festival, New Dance, Literary Arts, Performing Arts Stage, and a Concert on the Square, as well as the Fine Arts Exhibition. This large audience represents a broad spectrum of knowledge and appreciation of the arts, and the Fine Arts Exhibition addresses this spectrum with a diversity of styles and media. Works selected for the show reflect a wide range of artists’ experiences and viewpoints, with excellence as a common thread.

EXHIBITION LOCATION

The exhibition will be installed in the newly renovated Fourth Floor Gallery of the Decatur Library, part of the DeKalb County Public Library. In compliance with current library protocols, MASKS ARE REQUIRED.  

The City of Decatur, DeKalb County, Georgia, is located just east of and adjacent to the city of Atlanta’s in-town communities and near the metro area suburbs. With more than 200 shops and restaurants in commercial districts around the Square and in historic Oakhurst Village, Decatur is a popular shopping, dining, entertainment, and arts destination. Twenty-five thousand residents live in Decatur’s quiet, tree-lined neighborhoods and downtown condominiums, and as the DeKalb County seat, this thriving commercial community is the epicenter of county business. www.Decaturga.com

RECEPTION
A closing reception is planned for Friday, June 16, 2023.

SALE OF ART
Sales are encouraged. The Decatur Arts Alliance handles all sales and collects a 25% commission on all artwork sold as a result of this exhibition. All artwork for sale must be priced by the artist and so stated in the entry. Please be sure to include the 25% commission for the Decatur Arts Alliance in your price. The 8% Georgia sales tax will be added at the point of sale. Sales from the Fine Art Exhibition have increased each year and works from the exhibition have been added to private, corporate, and non-profit collections.

AWARDS
Best of Show:  $1,000
Gold Award:  $700
Silver Award:  $500

Purchase awards totaling $2,500 are selected by the City of Decatur for inclusion in its public art collection.

JURORS

Susan Bridges is the founder, owner, and director of Whitespace, a contemporary commercial art gallery located in a converted 1893 carriage house in the historic neighborhood of Inman Park in Atlanta, Georgia. For 15 years, Bridges curated pop-up shows around the city in churches, U-Haul facilities, shipping containers, and an underground parking garage. In 2006 she opened Whitespace Gallery in a former carriage house behind her Victorian home in Inman Park. Today the gallery represents more than 40 local and national artists, who’ve shown work at the Smithsonian Institution, the Venice Biennale, and Art Basel Miami Beach. In addition to directing Whitespace, Bridges is currently focusing her attention on i45 Collective, a group of Inman Park, Old 4th Ward and Little 5 Points galleries and the newly created Flux Projects, a non-profit benefiting public art projects. Susan is a current board member of BURNAWAY, an online magazine dedicated to the visual arts and Flux Projects. 

Stephanie Smith is an Atlanta-based artist, printmaker and educator who creates expressive narrative and symbolic images that represent a processing and reinterpreting of experiences and observations of both the natural and emotional world. Themes explored in the work include memory, loss, time, chance, and change. She earned her B.F.A in Printmaking from the Atlanta College of Art and received a M.F.A. with Distinction from the University of Georgia. Stephanie is a Senior Lecturer at the University of West Georgia where she teaches Drawing, 2D Design, Printmaking, Book Arts & Letterpress as well as serving as Coordinator of the Vault Gallery. Her passion for the medium of printmaking inspired her to co-found the non-profit community arts organization, the Atlanta Printmakers Studio in 2005. After serving for 5 years as President she continues to serve on the Board of Directors and volunteers her time at the studio. Stephanie has received numerous grants and awards and her work can be found in many public and private collections including Boston Consulting Group, DeKalb Council for the Arts, Fulton County Arts Council, Hastings College, King and Spalding, Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA), Royal Museum of Fine Art, Antwerp, Belgium, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Dallas, and Bernard A. Zuckerman Museum of Art.

Colleen Lawrence Ferketish is a book artist and librarian living in greater Atlanta, Georgia. She completed an MFA in Book Arts at the University of Iowa Center for the Book in 2020, along with a Masters in Library and Information Science. Lawrence taught calligraphy at the University of Iowa Center for the Book and has been a teaching assistant and winter resident in the paper studio at Penland School of Craft in North Carolina. Her studio practice includes sewing, collage, papermaking, and letterpress printing.

Application Requirements

How to enter:

All entries are to be submitted digitally through www.callforentry.org (CaFÉ). Please retain a copy of the information you provide on the entry form. 

If you have not registered previously with CaFÉ, setting up your portfolio is free. Participants may submit three entries for one fee of $30. Each artwork, which may include three images, must be submitted on a separate entry form. After completing the entry information, a credit card number or PayPal account will be required to confirm the entry process for the first submission.

Please note: The first entry will be paid by credit card or PayPal.  Second and third entries (optional) will use a coupon code in lieu of a fee per instructions on the CaFÉ website.

Each entry will receive the jury’s decision in a separate email, via CaFÉ, no later than April 16, 2023. It is the artist’s responsibility to monitor his/her CaFÉ account where all submissions will be listed and marked either invited or not under “My CaFÉ Entries.”

It is the sole responsibility of the applicant to note each artwork's application number, as this identifier will be used to announce the accepted works. Please retain a copy of the information you provide on the entry form.

CaFÉ requires that all images conform to a specific format. Before you begin the entry process, review CaFÉ’s instructions and tutorials. For technical assistance with your entry, please see https://www.callforentry.org/cafehelp.phtml, or contact cafe@westaf.org. For questions about exhibition guidelines, please contact finearts@decaturartsalliance.org.

Entries will be active on the CaFÉ website beginning February 13, 2023, and must be completed by 11:59PM MST on March 24, 2023.

Submissions Must Include:

•      Contact information including mailing address, telephone number, email address, and website address (if applicable)

•      Title of each work submitted

•      Year artwork completed

•      Brief statement about the work. This may include descriptive material. Limited to 1000 characters.

•      Up to three images of each work submitted for jurying. If the work is a 2-D work, an overall view and at least one detail are recommended. If the work is a 3-D work, two alternate overall views and one detail are recommended. All submitted images must be formatted to the specifications outlined on the CaFÉ website.  (http://www.callforentry.org/image_prep.phtml). 

Note: By submitting images of your work, you give permission to the Decatur Arts Alliance to use the images for publicity in the organization’s websites, digital publications, press releases, Decatur Arts Festival publications (both print and electronic), and online catalogue of the exhibition.

•      Image list numbered to correspond to the portfolio images submitted. Please include full photography credits as well as title, dimensions, and description of each work.

•      Presentation/installation requirements for the work submitted including any special fixtures required.

Notification of Acceptance:

Notification of the jury’s decision will be posted on CaFÉ no later than April 16, 2023, under “My CaFÉ Entries.” It is the artist’s responsibility to monitor his/her CaFÉ account where entries will be listed and marked either invited or not invited.

Accepted works must be received no later than Friday, April 28, 2023. Instructions for shipment and retrieval of artwork, as well as a consignment agreement, will be included in the Artists Welcome Packet as part of the notification email.

Eligibility Criteria

Artists are invited to participate in a juried exhibition of 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional works. Artwork will be chosen from submitted entries by a panel of three jurors on the basis of creative excellence and quality of execution.

•      All works must be original and completed within the last two years.

•      The sponsors are the final authority on eligibility.

•      Works to be hung must be ready for hanging with any necessary hardware in place.

•      Entries must be no larger than 24 inches in any direction, including framing.