manifest exhibition annual season 17
(2020-2021)

The Season 17 Manifest Exhibition Annual

In Season 17 Manifest continued to chart a course into its second decade as The Neighborhood Gallery for the World.

This was our seventh full season with expanded gallery spaces—an intimate yet museum-like sequence of five rooms of varying shapes, sizes, and personalities. Having the ability to confidently plan for 45 galleries of art across the year (nine exhibit periods times five spaces programmed for each period) once again enabled our staff to make the most of the rich options provided by our exhibit concepts and so many participating artists from around the world.

For each of our Exhibition Annuals it is important for us to explain to the reader that every exhibition at Manifest is put through a rigorous blind jury process—one which prioritizes quality over taste or style, and which by virtue of many jurors volunteering their time from across the country achieves a neutralization of any singular curatorial bias or juror prejudice. The works contained in this book, though inevitably determined in part by the artists who chose to participate and the works they offered for consideration, is also a culmination of this process of extreme selectivity. The 567 works represented here were chosen from among roughly 11,000 submitted across the year. With the obvious exception of our regional projects, and those which are restricted to student work (Rites of Passage and Master Pieces) our exhibitions are open to all artists anywhere in the world. In the exhibits documented in this book 319 artists from 43 states and 9 countries are represented.

Season 17 saw the production of 41 separate exhibitions. Among them are included our fourth Fotofocus Biennial participating exhibit, our second Five-Themes Project, and 13 solo or two-person exhibitions, rounding out Manifest’s customary balance between solo shows, annual projects, and unique thematic group shows. It is also worth noting that this book includes works by student artists representing 18 different academic institutions. Their inclusion emphasizes Manifest’s ongoing connection and commitment to our founding in 2004, when students and their teachers came together to establish a Switzerland-like organization—a nexus where their common ground of higher pursuit in the visual arts could be examined outside the confines of their own academic programs on common ground.

When Manifest reached its tenth year of exhibition programming we realized it was important to mark our new maturity with a declarative statement, so the decision was made to move from printing small softcover exhibit catalogs to producing the substantial and monolithic Manifest Exhibition Annual. We believe this has proven to be a much more engaging way for the public and participating artists to experience this documentation as an archive. It will also be more meaningful into the future for the artists whose work is included by cementing their place alongside that of their peers in the history of our programming, and the history of art in the world at this particular point in time.

It is my strong belief as an educator, artist, curator of exhibits, and founding director of Manifest that it is very important to distinguish between what it means to have a sense of taste (one’s personal preferences), and having a sense for quality (what one knows, objectively, to be ‘good’). The former is informed by personal experiences, biases, notions, cultural programming, and sentiment—usually for oneself as an individual. The latter is guided by detachment, study, comparison, craftsmanship, context, and understanding of principles. Those who are in a position to judge (jury) a body of work, and to plan an exhibition, serve in the role of arbiter of quality in order to present a collective whole which ends up not only greater than the sum of its parts, but also a rich opportunity for members of the public to practice their own individual sense of taste within an overall context of quality. That is what we work so hard to do here at Manifest. It is my sincere hope that this book once again serves as evidence of our success.

The pages that follow contain every work presented in Manifest’s galleries during our sixteenth season, from September 2020–September 2021. Each chapter represents an exhibition period of four weeks, divided into sections representing specific exhibits on view during that period. Each section is prefaced with the text that was included as part of the exhibition.

This publication is offered in honor of the quality achieved by each and every artist who participated, and everyone who supported the Manifest organization during our 17th season.

Jason Franz, Executive Director
Cincinnati, Ohio

View the season lineup here.