76th Annual Salon Show

Award Ceremony: Sunday, September 22, 1-3pm 

South Shore Arts is pleased to present the 76th Annual Salon Show, opening September 14 and continuing through November 10, 2019. This regional exhibition, in recognition of artists from Indiana and Cook County Illinois, is an exceptional display of talent and creativity from our region and beyond. A reception and awards ceremony will be held on Sunday, September 22 from 1:00 to 3:00pm.

The Salon Show is a tradition that has defined South Shore Arts since its inception in the late 1930s when ten area artists launched an exhibition of visual art in the hat department of the Edward C. Minas Department Store in downtown Hammond. The record is not clear, but there was an interruption in the exhibition for several of the war years. Then in 1944, it resumed again, becoming known as the Salon Show.

Thanks to the generosity of many long-time contributors, up to $10,000 in cash awards will be given away! Highest among the prizes is the Surovek Award of Excellence, a $2,000 top prize, that has been made annually for over 25 years in memory of Helen V. Surovek by her family.

THE JUROR

In contrast to the tradition of artists creating works informed by a consistent visual language, David Klamen embraces an aesthetic diversity that is directed instead by an exploration of an expanding idea. In recent years, the scale of his work has shifted from tiny to larger than life, the imagery from pictorial to digital abstraction, and the tone from the silent to the aggressive, yet in each there is a common commitment. All of these works use various visual images and processes in order to investigate the question of how we know our culture and ourselves. His current paintings test epistemological strategies as diverse as OP Art (and its implication that knowledge may be a purely retinal experience), empiricism (the idea that the sole source of knowledge is direct quantifiable experience), introspection, and others. In this investigation, Klamen plays with the history of art, utilizing modern and pre-modern conventions as metaphors for our communal search for meaning.

Klamen earned his Bachelor's of Fine Arts at the University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana, and his Master's of Fine Arts in Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He holds the title of Chancellor’s Professor, and serves as the Dean of the School of the Arts at Indiana University Northwest. Klamen’s work has been exhibited in international-level solo and group exhibitions across the US, Europe and Asia. His works are in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; the Elvehjem Museum of Art in Madison, Wisconsin; the Berkeley Museum of Art in California; the Illinois State Museum, Springfield; the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea; and the McNay Museum, San Antonio.