Student juror program

The apexart open call occurs twice annually soliciting idea-driven, group exhibition proposals from everyone, anywhere. Proposals of 500 words or less, in English, containing no images, links, videos, or CVs allowing the jurors to focus on the idea only. The New York City Open Call accepts proposals for exhibitions to be held at apexart in New York City, while the International Open Call is for exhibitions proposed anywhere in the world other than NYC.

The jury for each open call is composed of approximately 700 individuals and arts-related classes from more than 75 countries using an online crowdsourcing system. Each juror votes on a subset of anonymous and randomized proposals, generally 50, but you can assign any number. Our transparent selection process results in greater cultural understanding from exhibition submissions that reflect the interests and sensibilities of international audiences, while allowing artists and curators from locations that may not get their due attention to compete on a fair playing field.

How you, your university class, or your high school class can participate
As an individual, contact us at juror [​at​] apexart.org. To involve your class as an assignment or an elective, you can specify the number of proposals that students review for credit—generally 20–50, and take advantage of our lesson plans for subsequent discussion. It takes about three hours to read and rate 50 proposals. Each juror is given an individual login and password, rating each one on a scale of one (uninteresting) to five (I’d like to see it). At its conclusion, the process generates more than 20,000 votes on 400-500 submissions.

Classroom benefits
As apexart jurors, students review exhibition ideas coming from all around the world and actually help determine apexart’s exhibition programming— while gaining a real-world perspective of issues evaluating proposals and considering what makes one compelling and another less so. Our last open call drew proposals and jurors from 89 countries. Being on the other side of the “grading” process is essential to one’s own understanding of the curatorial process and the jury process in general, and sparks dynamic classroom discussion about what art is, what’s important to individuals and what art’s role and purpose can be. The variety of proposals provides valuable insight into the themes, conditions, history and ideas that are pressing in local and international contexts.

Sign up
You can provide names and email addresses of participating students for direct email, or let us know the number of students to make logins for, if you or they do not wish to be on our mailing list. You can send this information to lisa.vagnoni [​at​] apexart.org by October 1, 2023, and we will send login information, voting instructions, and deadline reminders to you and your students on November 4, the day before voting opens. 

Faculty 
We provide you with a live tally page that will show you the number of votes logged by your students, the ratings for each proposal given by each student, a copy of the proposal, the order of its ranking as determined by all jurors, and the last time each student logged in.

Educators find that serving on an apexart jury encourages lively discussion about many aspects of curating, writing, and exhibition organization including size, location, purpose, and feasibility. To date, more than 120 classes from universities and art schools have participated, including The New School (New York City), Node Center for Curatorial Studies (Berlin), Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, de Appel Curatorial Program (Amsterdam), Makere University (Kampala), and MICA (Baltimore).

More information on the program and how to sign up can be found here. Contact: Lisa Vagnoni, Web Director—lisa.vagnoni [​at​] apexart.org.