Get the Message: Words and Images
A Virtual Exhibition

Juror’s Statement

I interpreted the exhibition title, “Get the Message: Words and Images,” loosely. Art is style plus content, the visual object plus the plus underlying context or subtext. Ideally, the visible and invisible aspects merge into a sum greater than the parts, but the mixture of elements is not always 50-50. At the extremes lie pure beauty—i.e., the abstract formalist ‘pure’ abstract painting  the 1960s—and pure message, i.e., some of the more conceptually based art of the present day.  The juror’s job is to evaluate how well the visual and verbal aspects work together while keeping in mind and in perspective  the pendulum swings of culture. Ben Shahn said that style is the shape of content which is true most of the time, but there are no fast (i.e. fixed) rules in art, which should be viewed as slowly and thoughtfully as it demands, or time allows. This exhibition is a broad and compelling snapshot of how artists of conscience are dealing with the current crisis of meaning in our “bread-and-circuses” culture of naked ambition clothed in empty spectacle. Art is the guarantee of sanity, as Louise Bourgeois says.

About the Juror: DeWitt Cheng is an art writer/critic based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has written for twenty years for regional and national publications, in print and online, including: SanFranciscoArtMagazine.com, Daily Gusto.com, ArtBusiness.com, VisualArtSource.com, Artweek, Art Ltd., Artillery, East Bay Express, East Bay Monthly, Sculpture, Modo, Artomity, and his blog, ArtOpticon.us, with articles archived at Authory.com. He has written dozens of catalogue essays for artists, galleries and museums, and is the author of “Inside Out: The Paintings of William Harsh.” He served as the curator at Stanford Art Spaces from 2013 to 2016, and later Peninsula Museum of Art, from 2017 to 2020. He has a BA in Art History from Stanford and an MFA in Drawing and Painting from San Francisco State University.