five Questions with Juror, Timothy Standring

Timothy J. Standring is the Gates Family Foundation Curator of Painting & Sculpture at the Denver Art Museum. Since he began at the Denver Art Museum in 1989, Standring has led a significant initiative to make art and art history accessible to a broader public and has served the museum in many capacities. He has curated over eighteen exhibitions at the museum—most notably Rembrandt: Painter as Printmaker, Degas: Passion for Perfection, Wyeth: Andrew and Jamie in the Studio, and Becoming Van Gogh —and has published widely in the Burlington Magazine, Master Drawings, the Print Quarterly, Artibus et Historiae, Renaissance Quarterly, and Apollo.  His writings reflect interests that include 17th-century Roman patrons, monographic studies on European artists, British watercolor sketching, Poussin’s early works, Van Gogh’s drawings, Degas’s monotypes, and contemporary realist artists such as Daniel Sprick, T. Allen Lawson, Scott Fraser, the works of Andrew and Jamie Wyeth and Pere and Josef Santilari.   

Prior to his work at the Museum, Standring spent much of his career in academia, serving as Director of the School of Art and Art History at the University of Denver and faculty appointments at Pomona College, Lawrence University, and Loyola University of Chicago. He has been a Fellow at The Clark Art Institute, a Guest Scholar at the J. Paul Getty Museum, and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art, in addition to receiving other grants. He received his B.A. from the University of Notre Dame; his MA and PhD from the University of Chicago.  He is also an accomplished watercolor artist.

From your perspective, how do you view the role of art and creativity in smaller, more rural towns versus larger cities?

I’ve been to Tieton. I’ve experienced the famous 10 x 10 x 10.  Both are models of exciting, engaging, small town events that smaller communities, and even communities in larger cities can experience. All it takes is creativity and hard work to mount such events.  Individual rural communities should reach a consensus as to how  to proceed with their own creative initiatives. After all, the arts bring in community pride and commerce—will there be food carts for this coming 10 x 10 x 10? It would be a terrific addition!

What does successful community engagement look like for artists and arts organizations?

Successful engagement for artists and arts organizations is predicated upon a respectful dialogue intended to reach mutually agreed upon goals for the community.  Ideologies are strong, but needn’t be “It’s my way or no way.” Instead, there can be a strong synergy that sustains the dialogue between the organizers and the community of artists. Success: think big, but within reasonable goals. 

Artists can be pigeonholed into “celebrity” or “outsider” status. What makes a celebrity or an outsider, and what is the relationship between the two?

The question demands relativity and indeed, one could be both: Martin Ramirez (1895 – 1963) is one example, or to a lesser extent, Lee Godiva (1908 – 1994). I guess it involves the degree of recognition one receives.  Some artists receive celebrity posthumously such as Caravaggio, some during their lifetime such as Fritz Wunderlich, but then the limelight dims after a strong flash of attention. Will this happen to today’s current stars?

Why jury a small arts show like 10x10? What is the significance of “small” art?

Because small art tends to be intimate and immediate to the artist—I’m one of them—I’m excited about vetting the famous 10 x 10 x 10.

What will you be looking for in submissions?

I’ll be looking for integrity of the object, again which doesn’t necessarily help one understand what that means immediately, but it revolves around issues of form and content, that the two inform each other in a way that might be intuitively recognized. Isn’t this enough art speak for the moment? Other criteria: originality, technical finesse, and evidence of  bravura, brio, verve, and excitement. Advice to submitting: trust your instinct when deciding which work to submit.