Art Melt, the largest juried art competition in Louisiana, goes to great lengths to select a panel of three professional jurors. Each year we select one national juror from outside the Southeast, one regional juror from outside South Louisiana, and one local juror from Southern Louisiana.  The pool from which jurors are selected consists of art professionals such as museum curators and accomplished members of the art community who are not affiliated with show participants. No current or previous members of the Art Melt committee or Forum 35 are permitted to serve as jurors. These principles secure a jury that upholds the duty to establish a fair and professional environment in which Louisiana artists can compete.

The pieces submitted will be presented blindly and independently to our jury. Each submission will be ranked on a scale of 1-7 by each juror and then cumulatively ranked based upon overall ranking by all jurors.  The number of pieces to hang in show will then be determined by availability of space.

2012 Art Melt Jurors:

Franklin Sirmans

Since January 2010, Franklin Sirmans is the Terri and Michael Smooke Department Head and Curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. At LACMA, Sirmans has installed Color and Form, selections from the Broad Collection to coincide with the museum’s presentation of Blinky Palermo;  Human Nature: Contemporary Art from the Collection (cocurated with Christine Y. Kim) and a solo presentation of works by Robert Therrien from the collections of Broad and LACMA. He organized the museum’s presentations of AiWeiwei’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Project and the traveling survey exhibition Glenn Ligon: America. Prior to joining LACMA, Sirmans was Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Menil Collection in Houston, from 2006-2010, where he organized ten exhibitions including Maurizio Cattelan accompanied by the catalogue Is There Life Before Death?; Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster, 1964-1966; Steve Wolfe: On Paper; Face Off: A Selection of Old Masters and Others from The Menil Collection; John Chamberlain: American Tableau; NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith; Robert Ryman, 1976; The David Whitney Bequest; Otabenga Jones: Lessons from Below; and Everyday People: 20th Century Photography from The Menil Collection. He was also the coordinating curator for major traveling exhibitions on Bruce Nauman and Marlene Dumas.

Ron Platt

Ron Platt joined the Birmingham Museum of Art in 2007 as the Hugh Kaul Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. Platt organizes and implement exhibitions, installations, and their accompanying publications, and leads in the acquisition of works for the Museum’s growing collection of modern and contemporary art. Platt is former Curator of Exhibitions at the Weatherspoon Art Museum (1999-2004), where he organized over twenty exhibitions including the thematic shows Borne of Necessity, Around About Abstraction, and Lab Results: Three Artists’ Residencies in the Sciences (catalogue), as well as numerous one-person exhibitions of, among others, Phoebe Washburn, Beverly McIver, Luca Buvoli, Sheila Pepe, Dona Nelson, and Jim Hodges, whose traveling exhibition Platt co-curated with Ian Barrie, Curator of the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery in Saratoga Springs, New York. Prior to joining the Weatherspoon, Platt was Curator at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) (1996-1999) where he curated the one-person survey of Tom Friedman’s work which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Aspen Art Museum; the Center for the Arts at Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. At SECCA Platt also organized exhibitions of the work of Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Walton Ford, Whitfield Lovell, Heide Fasnacht and Radcliffe Bailey, as well as the group exhibitions Sliding Scale and Parallel Worlds. Before moving to North Carolina, Platt was Assistant Curator at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, where he worked from 1989-1996.

Thomas Neff

Thomas Neff received a BA in Studio Art from the University of California at Riverside and, in 1980, an MFA from the University of Colorado. He has been on the faculty at LSU since 1982. Working primarily with a 5 x 7 camera, Neff’s focus for the past forty years is with people, landscape, and architecture in the USA, and in Italy, Ireland, China, and Japan. His most recent work is a series of portraits and written narratives of citizens in New Orleans who did not evacuate when Hurricane Katrina struck. This work was published by the University of Missouri Press in December 2007, under the title: Holding Out and Hanging ON: Surviving Hurricane Katrina. Neff’s images are housed in the permanent collections of the California Museum of Photography, The Houston Museum of Modern Art, the Louisiana State Museum, the Spencer Museum, and in numerous college, university, and private collections.