Gualala Salon
& Salon des Refusés

Opening Reception: Friday, October 3 at 5:00 p.m.
Exhibit remains through November 22, 2014
Burnett Gallery & Elaine Jacob Foyer
Gualala Arts Center

The Gualala Salon is made possible by the generous contributions of
Jack Chladek, of Jack's Gualala Pharmacy, Sharon Nickodem, Bill and Karen Hay,
Francis and Susan Jackson and other generous sponsors.

For list of award winners, see below

Le Salon de 1824, by François-Joseph Heim

The Gualala Salon exhibit will be a juried and judged fine art show. The purpose of this exhibit is to showcase outstanding visual art and artists without regard to the type of media. Three prizes for artwork in the Gualala Salon will be awarded by the judge as follows: First Place $1,000, Second Place $750, Third Place $500.

Artists will deliver their work to the Gualala Art Center on Tuesday, September 30, 2014 between 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. All work submitted will be juried by the judge into the Gualala Salon (accepted work) or the Salon des Refusés (rejected work). Accepted work will be exhibited in the Burnett Gallery and will be eligible for the First, Second and Third Place awards. Rejected work will be exhibited in the Elaine Jacob Foyer and elsewhere throughout the Gualala Arts Center, and will be eligible for the People's Choice Awards of $100, $75, and $50. Every visitor to the exhibition will be asked to vote for three favorite pieces in the Salon des Refusés.

In this way, all art submitted and all artists will be represented in the exhibit, either in the Gualala Salon proper or in the Salon des Refusés.

In addition, this year, there will be a special Judges Award of $100 for the best work by an artist under eighteen years of age.

This year's Gualala Salon Judge: Larry Thomas

Artwork by Larry Thomas

Larry Thomas' work is represented in the collections of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C. as well as numerous other public and private collections. He is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowships and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art SECA Award, has shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions regionally and nationally, and has work in the permanent collections of artists' books at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Houghton Library at Harvard University, and Stanford University's Cantor Center, among others. His many awards and accomplishments include visiting scholar in residence at the American Academy in Rome, resident artist at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. He retired in 2005 from teaching and administrative positions at the San Francisco Art Institute where he served in several capacities from 1981 until 2005, including Associate Professor of Printmaking, Chair of the Department of Printmaking, Dean of Academic Affairs, and Interim President.

Each summer he teaches a drawing workshop at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on the coast of Oregon and in 2010 conducted a similar concentrated drawing course at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts at Deer Isle, Maine. In 2008/2009 he served as Visiting Tutor at the Burren College of Art in Ballyvaughan, Ireland, and conducted a specialized workshop in drawing at Bennington College under the sponsorship of North Country Studio Workshops. Additionally, he has served on many grant panels and has participated in several international cultural exchanges sponsored by the Ford Foundation and Columbia University and the U.S.I.A. He has served on the Board of Directors for the Alliance of Artists Communities, the Headlands Center for the Arts, on the Advisory Council for the Flintridge Foundation, and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Memphis Academy of Arts, his Master of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute, and an Honorary Doctorate from the Memphis College of Art. He currently lives and works in the rural northern California coastal community of Fort Bragg. More information on Larry and his art is available at LarryThomas.info, Larry Thomas on Art and Education and Larry Thomas & Handmade Paper @ Sonoma Valley Museum.

Some historical background on Salons and the Salon des Refusés:

Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe, by Édouard Manet

The original Salon des Refusés - Salon of the Rejected - started in Paris in 1863, following protests by many artists that the hanging committee of the French Academy had been too restrictive in its selection of work for the annual Salon. In that year the Academy rejected 2,800 paintings submitted for the exhibition. Artists, including Manet, Pissarro, Courbet and Whistler, were rejected from the 'official' exhibition because their works were considered by the committee too subversive and some even thought that these artists posed a danger to society.

In those days exhibiting in the Salon was one of the only means artists had of marketing their work therefore exclusion from its annual selling exhibition threatened their reputation and livelihood. Works rejected by the Academy in 1863 included Manet's Déjeuner sur l'Herbe, a painting now considered a masterpiece. Eventually to quell the furor the emperor Napoleon III came to view the rejected works and then asked the committee to reconsider its selection. When they refused, he decreed that the public be given the opportunity to view them in a rival exhibition and a tradition was born.

Ironically those artists included in the officially sanctioned 1863 Salon have completely disappeared and their work remains in obscurity. It is from these origins that the Salon des Refusés came into being. Following the tradition of the 19th century Parisian Salon des Refusés, when Napoleon III let rejected works be exhibited alongside those accepted ones, the Gualala Salon will incorporate a similar Salon de Refusés. The Gualala Salon des Refusés will exhibit the works rejected by the Gualala Salon judge.

We respect the Gualala Salon judge's decisions and understand that being selected to exhibit in the Gualala Salon Exhibition is a great honor and privilege, and we also understand that the Burnett Gallery space is limited and a lot of good artwork has to be rejected. We want those works to still be on show throughout Gualala Arts Center as part of the Salon de Refusés. We hope this rather novel approach will appeal to the judge, the artists and to the audience!

For information on last year's salons, see the 2013 Gualala Salon and Salon des Refusés.

Gualala Salon
Award Winners

October, 2014
Gualala Arts Center

The Gualala Salon and Salon des Refusés opening reception at the Gualala Arts Center was attended by over 100 artists and visitors. They viewed the "accepted" Salon works in the Burnett Gallery, and judge Larry Thomas presented the awards to the Salon winners. The crowd was given the opportunity to vote for their choices for first, second and third place for the works "rejected" by Thomas and displayed as the Salon des Refusés in the Jacob Foyer.

"The number of entries and their variety and quality exceeded our expectations," said exhibit curator Jane Head. "Having Larry as the jurist and judge was very special, and he brought more to the event than just his artistic eye. The incredible layout of food prepared by Black Oak Catering's Tanya Radtkey could have been another entry in the Salon, it was so artfully presented and delicious, and many of the artists also brought wonderful dishes to share with the guests. I also want to thank Wendy Bailey for helping me hang the exhibit in both galleries. Finally, Peggy Berryhill did a great interview about the show on KGUA's Peggy's Place show prior to the exhibit opening - check it out on Soundcloud."

After Head expressed her thanks to the judge, the participating artists and the reception crowd, Thomas then announced the winners of the awards among the 43 works that were selected for the Salon.

The exhibit remains on display through November 22, and the public is invited to vote (through October 31) on their choice of first, second and third place for the works "rejected" by Thomas and displayed as the Salon des Refusés. The winners of the "People's Choice" voting will be announced on Friday, October 31 and will receive $100 for first place, $75 for second place and $50 for third place. The overall $2,875 in prize money was donated by Sharon Nickodem, Jack Chladek, of Jack's Gualala Pharmacy, Karen and Bill Hay, and Susan and Frank Jackson for underwriting the Best Work Artist Under 18 Years of Age prize.

Award Winners

First Place ($1,000)
#76 A Walk in the Forest by Pamela Goedhart

Second Place ($750)
#92 Hidden Shakespeare by Elizabeth Sheets

Third Place ($500)
#47 Ayers Rock Australia by Peggy Zink

Best Work Artist Under 18 Years of Age Award ($100)
#82 Bonehead by Chase Oleson

Judge's Award
#56 Virgin Forest by Bonnie Saland

Judge's Award
#59 Orca With Redwood by Dustin Gaer-Smith

Gualala Salon des Refusés
People's Choice Award Winners

October, 2014
Gualala Arts Center

The People's Choice voting for the Gualala Arts Salon des Refusés exhibit was tabulated on Friday, October 31, 2014. Voting took place since the opening night of the exhibit, Friday, October 3, and 206 visitors to the exhibit cast their ballots for their favorite of the "refused" works that were displayed in the Gualala Arts Center Jacob Foyer.

People's Choice Award Winners

First place ($100)
#3 Unsheepish by Ron Bolander

Second place ($75)
#79 Mist, Mendocino Coast by Sunny Fransan

Third place ($50)
Snake and Plums by Roberta Tewes

The Gualala Salon and Salon des Refusés will remain on exhibit through Saturday, November 22. A total of 68 artists entered 108 pieces of their work into this fine art competition. The judge, Larry Thomas, juried 41 pieces into the Gualala Salon in the Burnett Gallery. The judge "refused" the other 67 pieces which are hung in the Salon des Refusés in the Elaine Jacob Foyer. It was from these "refused" pieces that the public selected the People's Choice award winners.

"The People's Choice awards don't have the big dollar monetary prize of the first, second or third place awards in the Salon," noted co-curator Doric Jemison-Ball, "but winning one of the People's Choice awards has the prestige and satisfaction that comes from knowing that your work was selected as exceptional by the public. Ron Bolander's response to being told that he had won the first place People's Choice award was that while he 'was pleased that his other entry in the show had been juried into the Salon proper by the judge, he was much prouder that his piece "Unsheepish" had been selected by the public for a People's Choice award.'"

The Gualala Arts Center, located at 46501 Old State Highway in Gualala, CA,
is open weekdays 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., and weekends from noon to 4:00 p.m.
Please call (707) 884-1138 for more information, or email info@gualalaarts.org.

Serving the coastal communities of northern Sonoma & southern Mendocino Counties.