14th International ARC Salon
The Art Renewal Center is pleased to present the winners and finalists of the 14th International ARC Salon Competition! This year the ARC received over 4,300 entries from 73 countries. Our finalists represented here today constitute approximately 35% of works submitted, just over 1500 works. ARC has acquired 16 new works for the ARC collection, valued at over $125,000. Our highest award, Best in Show, went to Gregory Mortenson, for his figurative entry of Standing Proud, where Mortenson depicts a young girl he met while working on a humanities project in Haiti. About the work, Mortenson said, “This young girl is growing up in an orphanage in Haiti. She has survived an earthquake and a hurricane and is still standing proud.” With her feet firmly planted on rocky soil, this contemporary depiction of human strength meets the viewer eye to eye.
Annie Murphy Robinson’s drawing of Casey, Adapt has won the Bouguereau Award, our second highest award in this year’s competition. Robinson also won First Place Drawing with her work of Emily and the Ram, Conjuring as well as Third Place Drawing and an ARC Purchase Award for her work of Casey, Waiting. It should also be mentioned that Daniel Keys was another big award winner this year winning First Place Still Life, Third Place Figurative and Honorable Mentions in both Landscape and the Fully From Life categories.
Come join us for the 14th International ARC Salon Exhibition consisting of 99 works from around the globe. We are extremely pleased to announce that we will be formally exhibiting the 14th ARC Salon Exhibition at Sotheby’s New York City location! Sotheby’s NY is the premier destination for auction and private sales. We are thrilled to be showing at this prestigious venue which will undoubtably showcase the 21st Century Representational Art Movement to an elite audience of collectors and art enthusiasts. The show is scheduled to first open at the European Museum of Modern Art, (MEAM) in Barcelona, Spain from December 6th, 2019 – February 16th, 2020, where it will hang alongside the MEAM’s representational painting and sculpture competition, Figurativas. A joint award ceremony will be held on December 6th at the MEAM. This awe-inspiring international event will have artists from all over the world present and hundreds of people in attendance, showcasing the true international nature and collaborative spirit of this new wave in contemporary art. The show will then travel to Sotheby’s, NY where it will be on Exhibit from July 17th – July 27th, 2020 with our Grand Public Opening on Saturday, July 18th from 11am – 3pm.
Updates and additional information about the live exhibition of the ARC Salon can be found on the Live Exhibition page.
For the first seven days the results are live on the ARC website, July 1 – July 8th, we will be holding an election for our second ever People's Choice Award! Visitors to the ARC website are able to vote for up to 10 of their favorite finalist or winning works. The winner will receive $1,000 cash and a full page in the ARC Salon Catalogue to be published by ACC Art Books, a division of a global publisher. Visit the People's Choice Award section on the ARC Salon results pages and click on the vote button below the works of your choice to cast your votes. Visitors will be prompted to login or create a free account so that we can track votes and prevent users from voting more than once. The winner will be revealed on July 12th, 2019.
This year the winner of the Da Vinci initiative Category, our category dedicated to works created by students 12 to 19 years of age, went to Celia Liberace, for her drawing of Forager. We are inspired to see this work with advanced technical skills created by an 18-year-old student, proving that high-school aged students are capable of learning these skill-based techniques and incorporating them into unique images with a unique voice. In addition, we have awarded Second and Third Place and eight honorable mentions in this category. We will be including a few of these amazing works by our artistic youth in the traveling 14th ARC Salon Exhibition.
We have two museum awards, a Purchase Award given out by the MEAM Museum in Barcelona Spain, which went to Karolis Greiciunas for his drawing of Old Days… , (This drawing has also won Second Place Portraiture), and an exhibition award given out by the Springville Museum of Art, which went to Ryan Brown. The Springville Museum has devoted a "Featured ARC Artist" gallery wall to their museum in their Founders Gallery, to be awarded to a new artist each ARC Salon Competition. Brown will have the opportunity to have a series of works hung at this prestigious location for the duration of this time period.
We are also excited to be having our second partnership with Fashion Week San Diego, where FWSD designers will be matched with the 8 winning artists' work and the designers will create an original couture outfit and look inspired by the work of art from the ARC Salon. After the first successful event at FWSD in San Diego last October, 2018 we decided we wanted to bring this event to NY while the ARC Salon Exhibition as a whole was on view. The ARC Salon winning works along with the specially designed garments will be on display with live models at Sotheby’s NY on July 25th. In addition, that day guests/attendees will be able to "vote" for their favorite piece and pairing. Winners will be announced the following day and additional awards will be given to the "team"/"individual" at that time. This will be an opportunity to promote Contemporary Realism to an audience who might not have seen it otherwise and to expose the Representational Art Movement to top fashion designers attending the event.
Also, five magazines, Fine Art Connoisseur, PleinAir Magazine, PoetsArtists Magazine, Enchanted Living Magazine and Collections Magazine, have given out a total of 11 awards to artists, and they will be featured in articles in each of these prominent publications. The International Arts and Culture Group (TIAC), an ARC Allied Organization®, has participated in the ARC Salon this year by awarding two $1,000 prizes to Odette, a collaborative sculpture by Coderch and Malavia and to Zoe Frank for her painting of Wedding. We will also be working with Rehs Contemporary Galleries, Haynes Galleries, and American Legacy Fine Arts to mount an exhibition and sale at each of these influential establishments for artists chosen by these galleries from ARC Salon Finalists. These shows will be held in 2019 or early 2020, view the Other Awards Page to learn more about each of these shows.
We have also for the first year worked with Windows to the Divine, who has awarded five artists a spot in their upcoming show entitled Contemporary Visions of Beauty, which will be held at Space Gallery in Denver, with the Opening Gala scheduled for Thursday, November 12th, 2020, with educational programming on Friday and Saturday, November 13th – 14th. Through their national network of collectors known as Collectors for Connoisseurship, they are known to have a large patron base and placement in the Windows to the Divine Exhibition will guarantee that many collectors are exposed to the artist and their work.
A big thank you goes out to our 18 main category ARC Salon jurors this year, who have donated their time and efforts in selecting in addition to Best in Show, the First, Second, and Third Place awards in our eleven categories (Figurative, Portraiture, Imaginative Realism, Drawing, Sculpture, Landscape, Plein Air Painting, Still Life, Animals, Fully From Life and the Da Vinci Initiative Category), as well as our special awards for Most Ambitious Work, Best Nude, Best Social Commentary, Best Trompe l'Oeil, and our Dual Category Awards. We would also like to thank an additional group of over 25 additional jurors who were involved in selecting our awards given out by partnering organizations. The 14th ARC Competition has been a combined effort of over 40 jurors, the incredible ARC Staff and all of our participating artists. We can’t thank everyone enough for helping to make this international competition a great success. A special congratulations is due to all of our winners and finalists!
We will be accepting entries to the next, 15th International ARC Salon Competition from April 1st through August 14th, 2020.
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