How do you handle age requirement for national juried shows? So many of them looks amazing but then asks for “minimum 18 years only.” Is there any work around for high school students?
There are national art opportunities geared solely towards high school students. Look into the National YoungArts Foundation at youngarts.org and the Scholastic Arts and Writing website artandwriting.org
Thanks. My daughter is still too young for Young Art, but submitted some works on Scholastic this year and just got regional gold keys for them. Those are only once per year though.
I do see some national juried shows that don’t specify age limits, whether intentional or not. She has exhibited in two of them, though she hasn’t won any reward. Is that what other talented high school artists do too? Reviewing every shows hoping to not find “18?”
How old is your daughter? Youngarts starts at 15.
What’s your objective? Is it resume building? Feedback? I would think your daughter’s art teacher would know of local opportunities for artists or wider opportunities for young artists. We have some regional ones for high school students, for example. If it’s feedback she needs, consider attending a National Portfolio Day.
Sorry that this has been a x-post with parents forum. But oh well. I don’t know how to fix it now. She is 13.
Daughter enjoyed art from childhood, and has some good achievement for her age, although it’s far from enough to give her early success as a child artist. She took art classes with high school students at young age, and after that took 9 community college art courses. She is taking her 10th now and her feedback need is met by them. She has been homeschooled, and applied to boarding high schools for this Fall because she wants to try other things in the world as well. She has reached to a level that she can continue her art more or less independently, with some guide from an art teacher.
Her first juried competition was for college students. Her ceramics professor recommended it, and her work was selected as an exhibiting finalist. She enjoyed the reception day experience. Later I came by a national juried show held in a local gallery, submitted her best work, and it was also exhibited, although neither of them got any award. She liked that reception too. It seemed submitting works to juried shows is a natural thing to do for visual artists. She was not really hoping to win a final reward and not competing in front of crowd like performing art, so not much pressure there. I sent her works to three more shows, and she exhibited one more time at a New York gallery, again no reward. This time I just shipped her work to save air ticket and time for travel.
Last night I found three more shows that some of her works meet criteria and don’t specify age requirement. It’s pretty easy to submit them, and the fee is reasonable ($20~40) for possibly being selected so she can put the exhibition on her resume. Unlike students events, those professional exhibits can stay on her resume forever.
I hadn’t submitted her work to K-12 competitions, because Scholastic and Young Art have age/grade limit. And competitions for younger age students just didn’t seem right for her. She submitted several of her art works to Scholastic this year for the first time. All got regional gold keys. But I am not expecting her to win any national medal yet. She can start submitting to Young Art in 2 years (or 3 years if she enter a school as an 8th grader instead this Fall) I will look for other events for high school students too, since she will become one soon.
If your daughter is serious about being an artist, and it appears from your post she is, then she is doing the right things if she is enjoying it. When my now 28-year old daughter (professional artist) was 15 and younger, she sought out opportunities wherever she could, and was often disappointed to find limitations. there were some competitions, but as you point out not many. My daughter was more interested in getting the right instruction, which was difficult to get outside of taking adult art league courses. Because she wanted to become an expert at classical realism art, she could not not find good drawing classes (beyond the basics which she’d taken) and focused on sculpture as sculpting from a model was always realist-based. What kind of sculpture does you daughter do? If it’s realistic/skills based I can suggest more.
@woodwinds Thanks. DD enjoys making animals, both real and mythical. It is skills based. She lacks life experience and general education to move beyond. She has been receiving good instruction on skills from community colleges. I will pm you her online portfolio.