Question about exhibition rules

If there's a better section for this question, please feel free to move it.

In pretty much all the juried exhibitions' rules around here, there's a time-related restriction. The typical phrase is, "All artwork must have been created within the three years prior to submission." Occasionally it'll be five years, but it's usually three. Is this common elsewhere or is it just a Western PA thing?
I can understand preferring recent work to some extent, but it get irritating when I work in spurts and finally have something I like then realize it's actually from 3 1/2 years ago and I hadn't gotten around to printing it yet.

If you didn't print it, is it still considered a final artwork for publishing? Or is it a work in progress? Aren't negatives materials for potential artwork?
These are philosophical questions, not really answering the question but how do they know. In my field, when there is a call, they usually ask for work that has not been performed/seen/published before.

I don't know if there is a prevailing rule. When I have seen a time limitation, it usually has been one year, but given as few calls for entry I look at, my experience barely qualifies as anecdotal. I came to the conclusion a while back that many of these competitions are simply money making opportunities for the sponsor. I was sort of thinking about getting one up myself.

Sometimes the restriction is there to prevent multiple re-submissions over many years of the same material.
I doubt the rules makers have even addressed the issue in their minds about the date of "creation" when it comes to hand made darkroom prints.
If you need a point of argument, show them something in your portfolio where you have re-interpreted a negative in really different ways over a period of time.

faberryman said:

I came to the conclusion a while back that many of these competitions are simply money making opportunities for the sponsor.

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Bingo.

The art club I belong to in the eastern end of Pennsylvania typically states: "Only original art completed within the past three years and never before shown in a <name of club> Open Juried Exhibition will be accepted." A similar line appears in the prospectus for our membership exhibitions. There is a lot of other fine print also about original work not derived from blah, blah, blah, etc.

In practice the elapsed time hasn't been too rigidly enforced, and in many cases the artwork itself does not have any date indication, so it falls into an honor system situation. As suggested upthread, one reason for the rule is to prevent a person sticking the same tired old piece in every show for ten years. The other, probably more sensible interpretation, is that it will encourage people to do more work; get out and about and paint, draw or photograph.

I am one who has about three decades of entanglement with these shows behind the scenes. I have observed that every time a new line of fine print is added after we found ourselves in some strange situation, the new rules and regs raise more questions than answers. It's a bit of a minefield, not to mention the difficulty of precisely describing in words what the rules mean at a usable level.

Thanks! The ones I've entered have not been the money-grab type (one is the Westmoreland Art Nationals and the other honors Mr. Fred Rogers). The one that's kinda irking me at the moment is not really an outside exhibition. Our local club scored a spot at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art and people there are jurying the show. They wrote the rules (there's no entry fee). There are other rules that bug me, but the date of creation one has bugged me since I started entering things around here. I just didn't remember seeing that in the few I entered when I lived in New England. Almost all shows I've entered have had something like "works that were accepted in this show in previous years may not be entered."

Most that I’m familiar with have a 2-year restriction; occasionally I see 3 years. My meter starts running when I create the finished work, not when I make the exposure.

I think the argument can be readily made that the past two years haven't really happened, though, so you still have plenty of time to submit your work, in my opinion.
On a slightly more serious note, I'd ask about what an earlier respondent suggested, "If it's not yet been printed/shown then it's not yet finished, ergo, you're still within the time frame."

It's not just a western PA thing; the majority of juried exhibitions I’ve submitted to (most of those being in or near eastern Pennsylvania or along the eastern US coast) have time restrictions. I typically see two years, and sometimes three.

The discussion above has brought up some interesting perspectives on time of art creation. I’ve often found myself in a similar situation to @winger, having read a prospectus and thinking, “Oh, I have something that would fit nicely within that theme, but I shot it eight years ago,” and neglected entering (or entering with my preferred frame). My personal view, now being appropriately challenged, is that the creation happens the moment I release the shutter, and when I sign and date my matted prints, that’s the date I’ve used. I guess I’ve always thought that if tomorrow someone made an estate-authorized print of famous-but-now-deceased-photographer’s-well-known-decades-old-negative, it wouldn’t be called “Well-known-title, 2021”, would it? Doesn’t the time limit on copyright protection of artistic intellectual property begin when the photograph was taken? If I never print a negative, does the copyright clock never start?

I’m not saying that the others’ arguments here are wrong, just that they have made me think.

There are no right or wrong arguments when discussing these kind of topics. Here are my thoughts today formed as I would explain them to someone who is not educated in the arts:

I think for people who aren’t artists photography is a means of documentation. To capture reality at some point in time, be it a landscape, portrait, etc. Of course this approach to photography is naïve but this is what most people do with a camera. The photograph becomes an object that can trigger the memory of an individual experience. When you show it to someone you say “I took this photo in the year…”

Works of art are dated when they are finished and become timeless. A sculptor does not date his sculpture (does not even call it a sculpture) when he buys a beautiful piece of marble. It’s material with potential because there is already plasticity and the sculptor can image the final work. Plasticity is the key, the trigger of the shutter. Gustave Le Gray combined two negatives to create his sea and sky albumen prints. If you see the legend next to the print in a museum it says “Albumen print from photograph.” Thus, the work is the print, the sculpture, the book and not the manuscript, the marble or the negative.

I know (many) composers who dated their works before they were composed to avoid being accused of plagiarism but the premiere of the work and the place is the most important piece of information about a work of music. When the score was written is anecdotal information for historians and musicologists.

Copyrights is a different thing. For example, if you see Ansel Adams prints at Moma they are copyrighted 2021 by the Ansel Adams Publishing Trust. There is a difference between intangible intellectual property and a copy or a print. Discussion about copyright shall belong to a different thread.

Negatives can be prepared and shown as an artistic creation, but I usually will show a print that, of course, could be created years after the negative was exposed. How could anyone make a case that the print existed at the time of negative exposure?

I would say a piece is created when it is printed and signed...not necessarily the date the negative was exposed.
I do not believe a copyright for a book is from when the author first picked up a pen (or typed the first word). Not sure this is similar enough to printing a negative to be much of an argument. I can see where it gets fairly subjective.

Do you think juried exhibitions are worthy of worry?

Vaughn said:

I would say a piece is created when it is printed and signed...not necessarily the date the negative was exposed.

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Molli said:

I think the argument can be readily made that the past two years haven't really happened, though, so you still have plenty of time to submit your work, in my opinion.
On a slightly more serious note, I'd ask about what an earlier respondent suggested, "If it's not yet been printed/shown then it's not yet finished, ergo, you're still within the time frame."

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I think this is where I'm leaning for the future. For any film shots, this is an easy argument to make as well. With the EXIF data for digital shots, I really don't know if a jurist would DQ someone because of that or not.

It's complicated in the case of negatives and prints, isn't it? Unless someone is going to sign and number their prints, and display an X'd out neg like you would w/ a fine art print in a good gallery, anyone could print a neg for a looooong time and call it a "new" print.

I know about galleries, coffee houses, open studios, alternative spaces, etc, but have avoided juried shows because the idea is absurd. Why should one person, or even a group of persons, decide which work is hung and which isn't? That person who is the judge is going to have any number of prejudices, we all do. Make it democratic by having open group shows. Sorta like co-ops do, but it need not be a co-op. Or take some stuff by galleries where you live and get some feedback about what they're looking for (although you should have already looked at the galleries and gotten a feel for what they like).

People are very attached to their favorite ideas and arbitrary beliefs anyway. When a bunch of artists met for coffee one day, someone suggested we have a group show where each artist could show a piece in any medium or style. Quick as a wink someone piped in w/ "So you're saying that if someone wants to show works that look like Dutch landscapes, that would be OK? Then I don't want anything to do w/ that".

What is the date of a painting? Usually when it is finished, I assume. Not when the concept of the image arose, nor when the first schetches were made...but when it is a finished piece. Same with most art forms. So I think you are pretty safe with that.

Shows. Shows are like novels -- which words and the arrangement of the words is important. Juried shows are just one of the ways to get the raw materials.

momus said:

Why should one person, or even a group of persons, decide which work is hung and which isn't? That person who is the judge is going to have any number of prejudices, we all do. Make it democratic by having open group shows. Sorta like co-ops do, but it need not be a co-op. Or take some stuff by galleries where you live and get some feedback about what they're looking for (although you should have already looked at the galleries and gotten a feel for what they like).

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Well, this is kinda different from the "usual" juried show. The photo club I'm in applied to the museum and was accepted. But they have a limited amount of space and want control of what hangs in "their" space. It's a group show of only WPS members, but at a museum.

I WISH there were more galleries in this area, but there aren't. The few I know are much more likely to take socially conscious works than anything else. Unless there's a barely hidden social issue in the images, there don't seem to be as many opportunities. I maybe should go looking for galleries, but I don't have finished projects to show or much that I consider good enough. And I mostly shoot things that I just like - no agenda.

Vaughn said:

What is the date of a painting? Usually when it is finished, I assume. Not when the concept of the image arose, nor when the first schetches were made...but when it is a finished piece. Same with most art forms. So I think you are pretty safe with that.

Shows. Shows are like novels -- which words and the arrangement of the words is important. Juried shows are just one of the ways to get the raw materials.

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This is how I'm going to approach it. Especially since I tend towards procrastination and rarely work on images soon after shooting them.

I think that the only way it would be an issue is if it showed something obviously dated well in the past (ie all the cars and clothes and hairstyles visible in the scene were clearly from the 1970s) or as the other previous mentions pointed out, something you had showed previously at the club/organization.