Union Art Gallery Celebrates Year 51 of Its Juried Exhibition in Newly Renovated Space

Haley Steines is the manager and curator of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) Union Art Gallery, and she has a special connection to art because of her mother. Haley’s mom was an artist and always encouraged her to get into the arts, but she only found her passion when she took AP Art History in high school.

“I was really interested in art initially because one, my mom was an artist, so I grew up with my mom’s art hanging up all over my house,” said Steines. “She always encouraged my sister and I to pursue art interests.”

The Union Art Gallery is hosting its 51st Annual Juried Show from Feb. 23 to March 14. College students in the Milwaukee area made all of the artwork included in this exhibition. It’s an open submission exhibition where pre-selected jurors review the submissions and select which pieces to put into the exhibit.

The Union Art Gallery recently moved locations, and this is the first of their juried exhibitions in the new space. The particular show holds great importance for the gallery, as it started the first year they were open in 1972.

“We’re in a much more visible location, so that has changed a lot of things,” said Steines. “We had a lot more students who aren’t necessarily art students, but still create art and were interested in showing work.”

Their old space was near the overlook in the UWM student union, which has much less traffic than their new location. The space was undergoing renovations last year.

There were three jurors for this exhibition, one being April Heding, an after-school arts and humanities manager. She is an alumnus of UWM and she had worked for the Union Art Gallery in 2008 to 2009.

“My current focus is arts education, specifically during out of school time,” said Heding in an email interview. “I work to ensure Milwaukee Public School students have access to art-making after school, on weekends and in the summer.”

Heding also talked about the process for determining which works were selected and how they determined a winner.

Each year new jurors are selected, this year there were three. All of the jurors got together and looked at images of the pieces, taking notes of which pieces stood out to each of them for “various reasons such as content or message, technical skills, originality, etc.,” said Heding. The jurors then discussed the pieces that stood out to them in more detail to determine which pieces to include in the exhibit. They also focused on how the pieces spoke to each other.

Ang Van Den Eeden, the artist of the ceramic piece in the photograph designed the piece guided by intuition, resulting in the free-flowing essence of the piece. The artist placed focus on the collaboration between the artist, nature and fire to create unique pieces.

Because of the jurors focusing oh how the pieces worked together, there ended up being an unintentional theme.

“This year I think the theme is, it’s very photography heavy I would say,” said Steines. “I also think the color is very cohesive this time around as well. Lots of earthy tones. Even though the jurors aren’t necessarily choosing a theme, what they like in general tends to become the theme.”

Because there were limited guidelines for this exhibition, there was a large variety of mediums used to create the pieces. There were photos, animations, canvas paintings, adobe brick, mixed wood, cast aluminum and many others.

“We give them total control for what they want to put in,” said Steines. “We just show them all of the submissions and they decided which ones to put in. We don’t have any criteria that they have to meet other than to choose a certain number of works.”