The Athenaeum Music & Arts Library at 1008 Wall St. has an interesting and highly varied competitive art exhibition on display. The show, which opened Aug. 6 and runs through Sept. 4, is titled “The Annual Juried Exhibition.” This is the 19th year the Athenaeum has held the event, which is open only to artists who live, work or have exhibited in San Diego. John Wilson, the curator of the Timken Museum in Balboa Park, organized and judged the entire event. He whittled down some 800 submissions to the 72 pieces created by 35 artists who make up the show. The art on display runs the gamut, from sculpture, fabric and mixed-media to painting and drawing. The pieces line the walls, are set on tables and are even placed on the floor. First place was awarded to K. V. Tomney for five small minimalistic drawings of swimming pools. Tomney, who lives near downtown San Diego, was born on the East Coast but grew up in Northern California. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from San Diego State University (SDSU) and attended graduate school at San Francisco State University (SFSU). Second place went to Lea Dennis for a large wall hanging called “Gloves” that consists of five pairs of boxing gloves made of white paper, with ten photos of the same gloves underneath. Dennis earned her bachelor’s degree in fine arts from SDSU and did a residency in Madrid, Spain. Dennis said “Gloves” is “an experiment dedicated to a principle or cause where there is no evidence that tremendous effort can result in success.” Indeed, it would be difficult to win a fight with paper boxing gloves! Miles McMillan, a La Jollan at home for summer vacation who is currently a senior at the Steinhardt School of the Arts at New York University (NYU), liked the piece a great deal. He said it was “visually appealing and very delicate.” Third place in the competition went to Elena Lomakin, who had two pieces in the show. One was an arrangement of different-size books without covers, which was placed artistically on the floor. The second piece was a very clever arrangement of pressed wild flowers which stuck out of the top of pages of coverless books, which were tied together with strings. Lomakin was born and raised in Moscow, Russia, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in art history and a master’s in English. She also studied studio art at SFSU. Lomakin said her fascination with using old books in art projects began “when a very old book fell apart in my hands and revealed some very beautiful components that would normally have remained hidden from view.” A number of artists were awarded honorable mentions, including Peter Gise, for a piece called “Lives of the Saints;” Bob Simpson for a long narrow painting on wood which featured red dots; Sally Hagy-Boyer for a twisting contorted wall hanging; the father-son team of Hector and Adrian Perez for five colorful drawings of a futuristic city; Michelle Montjoy, for a cut-up cloth piece; Kathy Miller for an odd mixed-media piece called “Skin” and another mixed-media of wood and cloth with long hairs; and Sibyl Rubottom for a book of aqua-blue water paintings. Perhaps the best of the honorable mentions was a painting in enamel, acrylic and ink by Amy Mayfield titled “Vile Smithereen,” which looks like a Dr. Seuss-inspired rendition of flowers from the deep sea bottom or some extraterrestrial world. Mayfield, who earned a master’s in fine arts from The Art Institute of Chicago, said she likes to “evoke imagined spaces” by “contrasting heavy globs of paint with delicate ink details which operate like ornament filaree to evoke shifting emotional tonalities.” The show is free. For further information see ljathenaeum.org or call (858) 454-5872.