Now that all is said and done, Baltimore's art community is finally weighing in on the Baker Artist Awards selection process. In some ways, the Baker Awards really revolutionized the art competition as we know it, and we should all be thankful for the breath of fresh air. However, I hope to see some important refinements in next year's contest.

The Baker Awards' biggest issue is in the end, winning comes down to clever marketing and basic organizing skills. Many people had this figured out immediately: the key to winning is to spam friends and family with “vote for me” emails, follow up, and make sure they stay active on the site so they can earn the privilege of voting for you several times. The possibilities for promotion are endless: your Facebook account, blog, website, and office are all up for grabs. All this is fine, but at a certain point it detracts from the spirit of the contest.

Practical people will tell me that's just the way it is. At least those visitors were exposed to some other art, whether they like it or not. But I've never like d popularity contests. I combed through the site looking for artists I thought should win the top prize. In a way, we all had the opportunity to jury and curate our own show. My voting board represented the work I wanted to be seen, period. I never voted for friends just because they were in the running.

At the same time, I can definitely deal with a popularity contest. The world is full of them. My biggest criticism is that the secret jury apparently pulled from the top vote-getters, or at least took vote counts into serious consideration. That, and none of us know our own vote counts.

While the Baltimore's Choice winners were by and large very worthy recipients of the award, it's conceivable they just had the biggest email contact list (though I would hope not). With that in mind, didn't the jury judge more on popularity than merit of the work? Might some excellent portfolios never have even been seen by the jury?

If I send my images to a traditional competition, at least I can be relatively sure they receive a couple seconds in front of the jury. Given the public forum of the Baker Awards, maybe it was incumbent upon me to use the system to my best advantage. However, we don't even know who the jury was. Were they ever interested in evaluating the artistic merit of all nominations, or were they happy to pick favorites from the cream of the vote-getting crop?

Without these answers, it's very difficult for me to comprehend a large difference between the Baltimore's Choice and Mary Sawyers Baker awardees. Isn't this problematic, given the fact that the award jumps from $1,000 to $25,000?

All in all, I commend the organizations involved for putting the Baker Awards together and I'm excited to see the process again next year. However, it's becoming clear Baltimore's artists are aware that an online, public forum does not always beget a transparent process (remember this with your federal government, too, folks). There is absolutely no reason why all nominated artists should not be able to see vote counts and names of jurors. How else will we know if we ever stood a chance, or how we can improve our chances and our exposure next year?

Returning to Monday's post for a moment, it isn't entirely incumbent upon us artists to be professionals. After all, what would happen if everyone exhibited top-notch professionalism in the business world?

Just as artists compete for top opportunities, the organizations providing those opportunities must compete for the top artists. They are responsible for selecting individuals who are producing well-considered work and presenting it well.

To that end, the big challenge for the two groups I've been discussing of late is sifting through the massive amount of images submitted. In the case of JPG Magazine, I have been gradually less impressed as the pool of contributors has increased. The top prize will inform my final verdict on the Baker Artist Awards. A strong, well-rounded portfolio in the number-one slot will keep me – and many other participants, I'm sure – engaged for years to come because we'll know the selection process is credible and we will continue to submit our work and challenge ourselves as creative people.

I feel very hopeful about the Baker Awards, more so than about JPG at this point. In some way, I feel like the Baker Awards are an American Idol for Baltimore artists. This sounds silly and I hope it doesn't offend anyone, but I can't think of another analogy that works so well. Regardless of whether I enjoy the show (I do, okay?), I can't dispute the fact that the model works very, very well. Beginning with a wide base of great talent, great disillusionment, and tons of hope and energy, a pool of contestants battle it out in the public eye. This, the audition, is the Baker site. In both cases, the end goal is not just to win a lot of money by snagging first prize – which always goes to a very talented individual – but to survive the process well enough and long enough to catch the attention of an industry professional. While very few of us will actually win something, we're hoping a curator or two will notice our work in the process.

So, unlike JPG, which has undergone a hefty amount of criticism during its crisis, I think the Baker Foundation and the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance have it just right and are putting Baltimore at the forefront of a new, very exciting movement in the art/curating world. They are taking a proven model that folks just love and translating it to fine arts, which is something I am happy – and privileged – to support.

The Baker Artist Awards public launch press conference is online at last!  I attended the online press conference, which marked the November 24 public launch of the Baker Awards, along with ten other Baltimore artists and representatives from the William G. Baker Fund, Fastspot, and the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance.  As resistant as I can be to showing/seeing/hearing myself on tape, here it is for your enjoyment:



Many thanks to GBCA Executive Director Nancy Harrigan for inviting me to participate in the press conference, and to the folks at Fastspot for making a great site (and providing an embed link!).

Today I participated in a press conference for the public launch of the Baker Artist Awards. Thanks to my copious blogging about the Baker Awards, the executive director of the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance invited me to say a few words on a live webcast. I had a great time despite going against my typically introverted character and putting a minor kink in the trainings I was doing for new VISTAs at the office.

Overall, I feel like I was given a great opportunity to be part of this process. Rather than writing about it at length, though, I will just make sure to post a link and a few more words when the recorded version of the press conference comes online.

In other news, I tried out a few new ideas over the weekend. I have often thought about but never tried to represent my exceedingly poor vision. Continuing with my current work, I took several images of the scene I see when I wake up in the morning.  Unfortunately, I don't think this one came out quite blurry enough...

[The upstairs railing, as seen through the bedroom door when I wake up in the morning.]

Combining my past work around lights at night with my current domesticity images, I finally got around to capturing an image that catches my eye every time I sit in our reading room at night. I may eventually go back and retake it from the couch with a longer zoom lens to represent my vantage point a little more authentically.

[Streetlight outside second floor window, looking into the back alley.]

This Thursday's links include...

• Did you know the National Museum of Women in the Arts is free every first Sunday of the month?  That means I could even splurge on a $14 Amtrak ticket rather than driving.  There really is no excuse not to go.
• Speaking of DC, it's too bad we can't combine Free Community Day at the NMOWA with American University's Mid-Atlantic MFA Invitational.  Oh well.
• I recently stumbled upon photographer Elinor Carucci and her "Crisis" series.  These domestic images are very intimate, almost to the point of making me feel slightly uncomfortable and voyeuristic.  It's interesting to see images so different from my own, yet still unfolding domestic life in pictures.
• The Magenta Foundation has posted a call for entries in search of emerging photographers age 34 and under.  I'm a little iffy about the $50 application fee, but then again, maybe that narrows the pool of competition.  Who knows? 
  

A couple weeks ago I announced my entry into the Baker Artist Awards. Since then I have been mystified and impressed by the nomination and voting process. More than any other juried competition I've seen, the Baker Awards are public, interactive, and multi-faceted.

For starters, most competitions are very anonymous: you send in your work, hoping it fits with what the jurors are looking for, and find out later what other pieces entered the fray with you. The Bakers are very public from beginning to end. At any given time, I can go online and interact with the competition.

In fact, this sort of interaction feeds the process. Sure, the big prize comes from the jury, but the pool of images they consider comes from the top vote-getters. The Baltimore's Choice Award is chosen entirely by voters. As stated on the Baker site, "the process is designed to open the nominations to the broadest possible community participation using the Web."

Interestingly, the site does not reveal how many votes you have gotten. It also doesn't give any hints on the “hidden goals” set by the foundation: benchmark achievements such as viewing ten nominations or promoting your own nomination that give you more voting power on the site.

Overall, I hope this model serves as an inspiration to other art competitions nationwide. Our generation is all about accessibility via the Internet, and it's encouraging to see this sensibility making its way into the competitive art world. Curated exhibitions within the site will add another layer of fun as local cultural figures choose their favorite art works from the nomination pool.

Whether or not they give me any money, recognition, or added traffic to my site, the Baker Awards are fun. How many competitions have I entered where I could say that?

Today the deadline passed for the Towson ARTS Collective “Travel Exhibit: Where have you been?” Within the week I have nominated myself for the Baker Artist Awards and submitted more creative non-fiction to the Urbanite. I marked the travel exhibit deadline on my calendar and set a pop-up window to remind me two weeks in advance. I narrowed down my travel photographs to four favorites.

On Thursday, with application in hand, I decided not to send my work in. Suddenly the idea planted itself in my mind that these were just travel snapshots, and it was just coincidence that they had been taken by a photographer with a nice camera. Sure, they looked great, but that didn't make them gallery-worthy. And could I write a convincing artist statement to accompany them?

At the time, my decision seemed informed and practical. After all, if I send my work for an exhibition in the future, did I want to be remembered as that woman who sent in her honeymoon snapshots for the travel exhibit? It was only prudent to hold work that wasn't intellectually up to par.

I could have predicted the regret I'm feeling now. How often I forget, I usually have nothing to lose by applying to something. My travel pictures may or may not be worthy of hanging in a gallery, but how will I know if I don't offer them up for consideration? There's no use mourning an opportunity come and gone, really, but I do need to remember this experience for next time.

Sometimes it just gets difficult to keep marketing my work and putting it out there because it demands a certain level of egotism, self-assuredness, and determination that these images warrant the world's attention. I heard it on my first day of Introduction to Photography back in the day, and it's true: everyone wants to be a photographer, and sometimes it seems like anyone's success is more or less by chance.

I think it's important to touch on these feelings from time to time, however briefly. I'm not at a point in my life where I experience a whole lot of self-doubt, but it happens to all creative people from time to time. We need to acknowledge it and move on, knowing not every submission can be perfect but at least we're getting feedback and getting our name heard. Art isn't a perfect display, it's communication. It's taking an image and preserving it just as you saw it, making it special. And there's certainly no reason to hide your work because you don't think it's “good” enough.

NOT to downplay the real, important election going on right now, I have finally cleared the hurdle of uploading three 10-image portfolios along with artist statements to nominate myself for the Baker Artist Awards.  In addition to boasting a significant cash prize for the winner, these awards celebrate art in Baltimore and engage local artists in a fun, competitive process.

Check out my nomination page, vote, and (if you live in the Baltimore metro area) perhaps even enter your own work in the running!

Just one link today, and it's for my fellow Baltimoreans this time.  This weekend, I'm going to set aside some time to enter the Baker Artist Awards.  If you live in the greater Baltimore region maybe you should, too:

Well, this week I actually did it.  I submitted pictures to every open JPG theme, even the weekly photo challenge.  This felt good.  A few people added my photos to their favorites and a couple more began watching me in their contacts.  Suddenly, I'm on a roll. 

Slightly less exciting was the fact that my main computer is broken, leaving me temporarily without most of my full-size versions of images.  This made for a big disappointment after I paid for entries to the annual Photographer's Forum spring contest only to find I lacked images with acceptable pixel dimensions.

All in all, though, it has been a good week.  The photo challenge was fun because it was a "camera toss" assignment, which I had toyed with before but never really gotten into.  I came out with many uninspiring images and a few good ones.  Some of the most fun for me were the ones showing my blurred arms reaching up to catch the camera, a happy accident I hoped was somewhat unique.  It wasn't.  There were so many outstretched arms I couldn't bear to enter mine, so I instead entered an abstract image.  I don't remember what it was originally, but I liked the simplicity and mystery of it: click here for the image (still working out some kinks with inserting images into entries, so I'd prefer to keep it to a minimum for now).