Principal Juror – Alex Baker, Curator of Contemporary Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

Editor's Comments - As a curator invested in an arts community that one might label “regional” or “local”––I have lived in Philadelphia for almost twenty years and have been kicking around the Philadelphia art scene for about fifteen––one might think I would be familiar with a good percentage of the artists from the Mid-Atlantic applicant pool. Surprisingly, I was happy to discover that I was utterly unfamiliar with many of the artists in this round of the New American Paintings competition. This slightly unsettled me. Am I failing in my job to keep up? Or is keeping up a Sisyphean task in the first place? Given the nature of working for a museum full-time in which over half of one’s workday is devoted to administrative duties (budgets must be balanced, invoices must be paid, odd bits of paper must be generated) how can we as cultural workers stay abreast of the latest and the greatest? We try, but ultimately we fail. As more and more artists are minted every year, our filtering mechanisms are further confounded and our ability to know an art world––whether it be local, national, or global––is exponentially challenged. This is why a publication like New American Paintings provides such an invaluable service to the harried curator, or anyone else who understands the difficulty of knowing and navigating an art world.

Since I inhabit a space that is perhaps more local than global (Philadelphia) and is associated with representational traditionalism rather than the “cutting edge” (the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts), one might assume a predisposition on my behalf towards one kind of art over another––some kind of Philadelphia Realism, perhaps. But my location in a regional city in a temple of representation is liberating rather than constraining, and as a result, I am not a card-carrying spokesperson for any one artistic style. Philadelphia is more cosmopolitan than one might imagine and the Pennsylvania Academy less conservative than the word “Academy” might imply. Philadelphia contains an array of impressive institutions hosting a wide range of contemporary exhibitions that reflect artistic practices from throughout the world. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, America’s oldest museum and school, continues to be relevant as figurative and representational art has once again become fashionable. Furthermore, it has maintained a contemporary art series since 1978 that has shown artists as diverse as Dotty Attie, Harriet Feigenbaum, Judith Schaechter, Charles Burns, Jeremy Blake, Virgil Marti, Marcel Dzama, and Nan Goldin, among many others.

I tried to temper my own idiosyncratic predisposition toward particular modes of expression with ones that I might not fully embrace at first glance, as I understood my role as juror to both reflect and challenge my own aesthetic taste (I have soft spots for color, narrative, decoration, popular culture, and outsider tendencies I will confess; I am fond of Jess’ gooey Translations paintings and Peter Saul’s satirical history paintings). This strategy, I believe, paid off. What lies ahead in these pages represents a cross-section of contemporary painting practice: cartoon-like illustrations that borrow from comics and contemporary graphic design; pattern and decoration that share some affinity with textile and fabric design; colorfield minimalism; abstraction that seems also photographic; surrealist-like fantasy employed to represent the landscape and the human figure; the adoption of folk and outside art (for lack of better terms) to portray various subjects; and paintings that combine abstraction and representation simultaneously, among other approaches.

But what are paintings these days and how do we qualify them as such? During the jurying process, I was both happy and confused to see a range of media including watercolor, colored-pencil, ink, acrylic, and charcoal applied to paper as qualifying “painting.” The media police might scream “drawing not painting!” and demand that The Open Studios Press change the title of their bimonthly publication to New American Paintings and Drawings. Is medium anxiety inevitable in this day and age? Is it okay to use painting as an umbrella term for any medium applied to a two-dimensional surface? Embracing expanded definitions of what constitutes painting is a positive development, I believe, and one advocated by the folks at New American Paintings. It allows for a plurality of approaches and therefore offers a wider range of artists the opportunity to be seen.

Pushing the limits of painting today, as well as recognizing the importance of roads well traveled as both foundations and points of departure for their work, the artists included in this volume underscore the continued vitality of the medium. The quality and variety of the selected works also demonstrates the important contributions of those working outside the confines of dominant art world centers.