Art Center Sarasota’s 2023 exhibition Identity: Exploring the Human Condition brought together more than 100 works selected from over 300 submissions.
The exhibition included oil, watercolour, mixed media, sculpture, photography and digitally manipulated images.
Many routes into one broad subject
Juror Christy Paris encountered works addressing race, politics, gender, age, family and money.
The theme was intentionally open enough to allow artists to define identity through social structures, personal memory or material experimentation.
George Zebot won first place for the oil-on-wood painting Healing Democracy.
Julie White received second place for Reflection, made with oil and mixed media on canvas, while Ravi Venkataraman took third place for the acrylic-on-wood work Breaking Free.
Emotional truth across different forms
Merit awards went to Eva Bejar for Roses on Grey and Jana Millstone for Everybody Smiled.
Honourable mentions recognised Ann Kozeliski’s sumi-e work Enough for the Bus, Perry deVick’s Memento Mori, Memento Vivere, Richard Monteleone’s Chemical Isolation and Denise Pruett’s photograph Internal Struggle.
Paris’s background in queer inclusion and museum education informed her emphasis on multiple viewpoints rather than a single approved interpretation.
The exhibition’s scale made it possible for highly personal work to appear beside political and social commentary.
Identity did not attempt to define the human condition uniformly. Its curatorial value came from allowing more than 100 visual responses to contradict, overlap and validate one another.