Portrait Competition -- 10 Days Left To Enter!

Revision: The call for entries deadline has been extended to November 30, 2011

Hello from Portrait Competition central! I’m Laura, the intern dedicated to the 2013 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. From my cube at the Portrait Gallery I deal with it all: handling e-mails and phone calls, monitoring of all the submissions, and of course tweeting my enthusiasm—all competition, all the time.

While reviewing artist inquiries this morning, I was struck that there are only 10 more days to enter the triennial competition. The call for entries period has been quite an experience—the Portrait Competition team has laughed, cried (maybe not quite), and survived multiple natural disasters (really) . . . but most important, we’ve been truly blown away with the volume and artistic skill of submissions.

It’s been amazing to watch the hundreds and hundreds of entries pour in weekly, coming from everyone from art students to established professional portraitists. As a student of both art history and museum studies, I’m amazed by the diversity of media that artists are employing to help us figure out contemporary portraiture.

Entrants are exploring what it means to practice figurative art and pushing the boundaries of portraiture in exciting ways, through painting, time-based media, sculpture, digital media, and photography (to name just a few approaches).

As the interns who worked on the 2009 competition noted, I would definitely not want to have to be on the jury for this competition—it would be far too hard to choose.

The call for entries is open until October 31, 2011, so there’s still some time left to enter. We’d love to see what you have to say about the contemporary art of portraiture!