Prospectus

GreaterRestonArtsCenter (GRACE)

2010 Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival

On the third weekend in May the Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival showcases the best contemporary fine art and craft from around the country. Approximately 200 artists fill the streets of Reston’s up-scale Town Center with an outdoor art exhibition that Art Fair Sourcebook calls, “…the top fine art show on the East Coast!” Artists are selected on the basis of quality, originality, and craftsmanship by a panel of jurors who are experts in their fields. Award winners from the previous year and six percent of participating artists are invited by the festival organizers.  The festival is produced by Greater Reston Arts Center (GRACE) and supports its exhibition, education, and outreach programs. No sales commissions are charged and festival admission is free but voluntary donations to support GRACE are encouraged.

MISSION: The mission of Greater Reston Arts Center, a 501(c) (3) non-profit organization, is to enrich community life through involvement and excellence in contemporary visual arts. The purpose of the Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival is to help fulfill that mission by offering the highest quality fine art and craft to the public in a pleasant, accessible, well-managed venue.

JURORS:

Bruce Helander Bruce Helander Biography Bruce Helander is an artist whose specialty is collage and assemblage. He is also a well-known curator and art critic. He has a master’s degree in painting from the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, where he later became the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs of the college. He is a fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and recently won the South Florida Cultural Consortium fellowship for professional achievement in the visual arts. Helander arrived in Palm Beach in 1982 from New York City, where he published Art Express magazine. He quickly established a cutting edge gallery on Worth Avenue that thrived for thirteen years. During that time he opened a second gallery on West Broadway in New York City. He was also a commissioner for ARCOM in Palm Beach and the vice-president of the Worth Avenue Association. He is active in the south Florida art scene and was on the board of directors at the Armory Art Center and later was the Director of Exhibitions there. City Link magazine called Bruce Helander “Arguably the most recognized and successful collage artist in the country...” and Kenworth Moffett, former director, Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale said in Gold Coast magazine that “If there was a Pulitzer Prize for collage, Helander would surely win it.” His work is in over fifty museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and most recently, the Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. As a curator, Helander has coordinated over eighty exhibitions of contemporary works. He has organized one-man shows for legendary artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, John Chamberlain, Duane Hanson, Larry Poons, Jules Olitski, Dale Chihuly and Kenneth Noland, among others. Helander’s written observations about art are unusual in that very few art writers are also artists—in this case, with an academic background, extensive gallery and publishing experience and regular exhibit of his work. Elisabeth R. Agro Biography Elisabeth R. Agro is The Nancy M. McNeil Associate Curator of American Modern and Contemporary Crafts and Decorative Arts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, arriving in the fall of 2005. Elisabeth Agro received her B.A. in Italian Studies from Mary Washington College, Fredericksburg, VA, and an M.A. in the History of Decorative Arts from Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution/Parsons School of Design, NY. Her curatorial career began at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA as a curatorial assistant in the Decorative Arts Department in 1996. Elisabeth’s tenure at the Carnegie ended in 2005 as associate curator and acting department head of Decorative Arts. While at Philadelphia Museum of Art, she has executed several exhibitions: Precious Possessions: The American Craft Collection; Cultural Convergences: Recent Acquisitions in Contemporary Craft; Wrought & Crafted: Jewelry and Metalwork 1900 – Present and organized Calder Jewelry. Elisabeth is currently working on her next exhibition, InFormed By Fire: Hightlights of American Ceramics which opens March 6, 2010 and runs through January 2011—presented in honor of National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts 44th Annual conference to be held this spring in Philadelphia. Elisabeth is passionate about food and is an amateur food historian. One of her areas of interest is dining, banqueting, and food history from the 16th century to the present, focusing on glass, metalwork, and ceramics.       Lloyd E. Herman Lloyd Herman has observed America's contemporary craft movement at close range for forty years. And, in his belief that it warrants greater recognition in the nation's visual arts, he has curated exhibitions and written about the creativity of America's artists in glass, clay, wood, metal and fiber. The University of Washington Press calls him "one of the foremost authorities on the contemporary craft movement in the United States." And, as founding Director of the national craft museum of the United States--the Smithsonian Institution's Renwick Gallery--from 1971 until 1986, his name became synonymous with the Gallery and its exhibitions and public programs. From 1988 through 1990, as director of the Cartwright Gallery in Vancouver, British Columbia, he planned a new building for the Gallery and supervised its evolution into The Canadian Craft Museum. As Acting Senior Curator at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington, he helped plan the new building and its programs in the late 1990s. He has continued to curate traveling exhibitions--Trashformations: Recycled Materials in American Art and Design and American Glass: Masters of the Art toured North American museums. Looking Forward, Glancing Back: Northwest Designer Craftsmen at Fifty recently toured, as did Trashformations East. Pulp Function, a traveling exhibition of contemporary paper art has just concluded a national tour for the Fuller Craft Museum.	Elisabeth Agro	Lloyd Herman
(click here for bio)	(click here for bio)	(click here for bio)

FESTIVAL DATES: 

Saturday and Sunday May 15 and 16, 2010

10am – 6pm daily rain or shine

LOCATION: 

Reston Town Center

Reston, Virginia

APPLICATION DEADLINES AND FEES:

All applications to the Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival must be submitted online through www.juriedartservices.com

Early Deadline: November 1, 2009, Midnight EST

Late Deadline:  November 25, 2009, Midnight EST

The non-refundable fee for applications of $40 is payable online by credit card or via the mail by check.  Early or late deadline dates apply.

After November 1, 2009, an additional late fee of $35 is required.

No applications will be accepted after November 25, 2009.

TO ENTER: Each application requires an online application, a non-refundable application fee, and artwork images as described below for consideration by the jury.

MULTIPLE ENTRIES: Artists who enter more than one medium must submit separate applications, fees, and images for each medium in which they wish to be considered. If only one application is accepted, only work in that application may be exhibited. An image of the same piece of artwork will not be accepted in more than one application. Artists may submit only one application per medium.

Submit applications in the appropriate medium as listed below.

Ceramics

Decorative Fibers

Digital Art

Drawing & Pastels

Furniture

Glass

Jewelry

Leather

Metal

Mixed Media 2D

Mixed Media 3D

Oil & Acrylic Painting

Photography

Printmaking

Sculpture

Watercolor

Wearable Art

Wood

IMAGES: Applicants must electronically submit 4 artwork images and 1 booth image (mandatory) that are fully representative of the work they will exhibit at the 2010 Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival.

ELIGIBILITY: The Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival is open to all artists 18 years of age and older. All work must be original, well conceived, and expertly executed by hand or with appropriate tools by the exhibiting artist. Artwork produced with commercial kits (e.g. molds, patterns, plans, prefabricated forms) or by other commercial methods is not eligible. Collaborative work must be submitted as a joint application. Studios producing works in volume are not eligible. T-shirts, commercial clothing, candles, soap, and reproductions (other than those listed below) are not eligible. All work must have been created within the last two years.

AWARDS: Greater Reston Arts Center along with individual sponsors recognizes superior work through cash awards. A panel of judges knowledgeable in fine art and craft will visit each artist on the first day of the festival and selects award winners. Awardees are automatically juried into the following year’s festival.

NOTIFICATIONS: Jury results will be sent to applicants by individual email on January 15, 2010 and posted confidentially on the Juried Art Services website under the Manage Application function.

Forms and information will be electronically linked to a 2010 Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival Accepted Artists website. Instructions on how to access the site will be included in the January 15^th acceptance email. All correspondence between Greater Reston Arts Center and accepted artists will be electronic. Artists must use the website provided in their notification email to retrieve important festival information.

2010 EXHIBITING ARTISTS ONLINE DIRECTORY: As artists send in their acceptance forms and fees, Greater Reston Arts Center will post on its website the name of each artist, their selected medium, an image of their work, and a link to their website. All accepted artists will be listed online by April 2010.

WAITLIST POLICY: A waitlist for each medium will be developed based on the jurors’ scores. Waitlisted artists will be notified only when a space becomes available within their medium.

RULES:  Only artwork that is consistent with the submitted images and produced by the artist may be displayed or sold at the festival. Artists may only exhibit work in the medium (media) for which they were selected.

Limited edition prints of no more that 250 from one source, hand-pulled, signed, and numbered by the artist, will be permitted.

Reproductions, including giclée prints, are permitted but must not comprise more than 10% of the artwork. Each reproduction must be signed, numbered, matted or framed, clearly marked “reproduction” on labels, and kept in a browse bin.

Photographic and Digital art prints must be made from the artist’s original negative or digital file under the artist’s supervision. All prints must be in limited editions, inclusive of all sizes, on archival paper, numbered, and signed by the artist.

All two dimensional artwork must be appropriately framed or matted and must be displayed on a suitable panel or in a portfolio or stand.

All artwork must be signed by the artist.

BOOTH SPACE ASSIGNMENT: Accepted artists are required to pay a $500 booth fee to secure a space. Additional premium spaces and fees will be determined at a later date. Festival booth spaces are assigned on a first-come, first-served basis, based on when fees and forms are postmarked. Forms and fees will be accepted beginning January 29, 2010.

All forms, including hand delivered forms, received prior to this date will be grouped with those postmarked January 29, 2010.

Booth space will not be guaranteed for artist acceptance forms postmarked after February 19, 2010.

BOOTH REQUIREMENTS: The use of the booth location is strictly restricted to the artist to whom it is assigned; no proxies will be permitted. Two artists who produce single works may apply as collaborating artists and occupy one booth.

Artists must personally attend their booth for the duration of the festival; no unattended booths are permitted. Booth sitters will be available.

Booths must be a ten-foot-square, white, covered tent. All tents must be secured with appropriate weights to insure stability in inclement weather. Water-filled barrels may be rented by exhibitors. Tents may not be secured to the pavement by any means.

All artwork must be set up within the booth space. No art is to be displayed outside the allotted booth space.

Violation of festival policies may result in dismissal from the festival and forfeiture of all fees paid.

REFUND POLICY:  Submission of an artist acceptance form is considered a commitment to participate in the Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival. In the event of an emergency and at the discretion of Greater Reston Arts Center, an alternate exhibitor may be assigned to the booth space and a refund granted to the original artist. A $50 administrative fee for all cancellations will be charged. No refunds for booth fees will be made after March 31, 2010 for cancellations or violations of festival policies.

CALENDAR:

NOVEMBER 1, 2009

Deadline for applications

$40 non-refundable application fee

NOVEMBER 25, 2009

Deadline for late applications

$40 non-refundable application fee + $35 late fee

JANUARY 15, 2010

Email notification

JANUARY 29 – FEBRUARY 19, 2010

Acceptance forms and booth fees are due.

After February 29, open spaces will be offered to waitlisted artists

$50 administrative fee will be charged to process any cancellations.

MARCH 31, 2010

No booth fee refunds after this date.

MAY 14, 2010, Friday

Artist check-in 10:00 am – 6:00 pm

Booth set-up Noon – 9:00 pm

MAY 15, 2010, Saturday

Artist Check-in 6:00 – 9:00 am

Booth set-up 6:00 – 9:30 am

MAY 15 - 16, 2010, Saturday & Sunday

Festival open 10:00 am – 6:00 pm each day, rain or shine

MAY 16, 2010, Sunday

Dismantle 6:15 – 9:00 pm