On Saturday, Aug. 2, the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library debuts its 17th annual Juried Exhibition, showcasing the work of 39 local San Diego artists, including four from La Jolla.
The exhibition, free to the public, continues through Aug. 30.
The prestigious exhibition is open only to “artists who live, work or exhibit in San Diego County,” said Athenaeum Executive Director Erika Torri.
Each year Torri appoints two jurors, prominent San Diego-area administrators of art organizations or galleries, who in turn select the art for the show. This year’s jurors are Deborah Klochko, executive director of the Museum of Photographic Art (MoPA) in Balboa Park, and Robin Clark, curator of the La Jolla’s Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.
Torri, who joined the Athenaeum in 1989, firmly believes that local artists should have a venue to exhibit their work locally, which is why almost all the library’s shows feature San Diego artists. She began the juried exhibition 17 years ago to help new and emerging artists gain exposure to museum curators, gallery owners and collectors who might not otherwise discover the artists’ work.
“Many artists have been picked up by a gallery or invited to exhibit at a museum,” Torri explained, directly as a result of their work’s appearance in the juried exhibition.
Jurors are chosen on the basis of their prominence in the artistic community, their knowledge of contemporary art and their willingness to foster emerging artists’ careers.
Among the works selected for this year’s show include paintings, sculpture, photographs, mixed media and drawings. Only fine arts, no crafts or jewelry, were juried into the show. Many artists have participated in previous exhibitions, and one artist, abstract painter Peter Geise, has had work accepted in every Juried Exhibition.
First-time exhibitors this year are two award-winning La Jolla artists who both began wintering in San Diego in 1999 and subsequently moved from the East Coast to live here year-round.
Photographer Judith Fox is exhibiting two black-and-white photographs of her husband, Edmund, both from her series “Fragments: Loving and Living with Alzheimer’s.” Thirty of these photos are in the permanent collection of MoPA, whose former director, Arthur Ollman, encouraged Fox to develop the photos into a book documenting her husband’s survival with the degenerative disease.
She began photographing her husband in response to “The Model Wife,” an exhibition of more than 100 photographs Ollman curated for MoPA, which includes nine prominent male photographers’ images of their wives.
“I didn’t start this as an Alzheimer’s project,” Fox said. “When I started photographing him, no one was doing that ” no women photographers were photographing their husbands and lovers ” and I thought I should be the one.”
Fox, also a painter, had her own photography studio in New York when she was in her 20s.
While pursuing a career in corporate human resources and later, after moving to central Virginia, building her own temporary services firm, she had to limit her photography to vacations. She returned to fine arts photography after selling her business in 1996.
“I have always had dual tracks in my life. Where I’m really fortunate is that I’ve been passionate about both,” Fox explained.
Painter Donatella Wachtel also returned to her first love, painting, after her two children departed for college in the early ’90s. A native of Rome, she met her American husband while working for IBM in the Italian capital. She studied painting in Rome, New York City and Connecticut, where she lived for 30 years before moving to La Jolla full-time two years ago.
Wachtel, who is exhibiting three mixed media works from her Landscape with Gold Leaf series, paints primarily landscapes and seascapes, inspired by her emotional response to the ocean, land and light. She paints to express her “visual experience of nature” and describes her style as becoming less representational as it evolves.
“In the life of the artist, we like to become less representational as we grow. It’s more challenging to be less representational. You have to be more creative. I find myself removing a lot of details from the landscape that don’t add to the emotion you want to evoke,” she said.
Wachtel feels it’s important that both the artist and art buyer have an emotional connection with their artwork.
“I think that people should buy a painting only if it talks to them, not because it’s red or white” or fits into their décor, she explained.
La Jolla residents Jim Jahn, a painter, and Gwen Beope, a colored pencil artist, also have work in the juried exhibition.
The Athenaeum is located at 1008 Wall St. and is open from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, and until 8:30 p.m. Wednesdays. For information, visit www.ljathenaeum.org or call (858) 454-5872.