21st National Juried Exhibition

AXIS GALLERY
21st ANNUAL NATIONAL JURIED COMPETITION
August 7–30, 2026

Second Saturday Reception August 8, 2026, 5–8 PM

Axis Gallery presents the 21st Annual National Juried Competition, a group exhibition featuring works selected by juror Sharon Butler, founder of Two Coats of Paint. The exhibition includes works by artists from around the country in a variety of mediums.

JUROR’S STATEMENT
The Axis Gallery received 658 submissions to an open call, and I could have selected five exhibitions instead of one without feeling professionally compromised. Narrowing such a high- quality profusion down to a single hang was a real challenge. Whereas traditional thematic trawls tend to be self-limiting, open calls like this one afford the juror no circumscribing guidance – only that of quality on the terms artists set for themselves. And the work I perused made it clear that artists throughout the country and across genres are richly engaged in conversations about ideas, materials, emotional content, and formal issues. The show’s density is testament to the abundance of pieces that were simply too good to leave out.

Since no theme was handed down in advance, my job was to arrive at a selection piece by piece, submission by submission, until I saw the show take shape from what artists are concerned about and refracting through their work right now. I encountered a gnawing disquiet, an insistence on making things by hand, an interest in place, and the use of materiality and process as metaphor. Although I don’t believe most of the submitting artists know one another, the selected works seem connected, as if they might mutually complete sentences. And indeed, one virtue of an open call is that it is liable to produce an unplanned consensus – a kind of serendipity that might elude a more deliberately curated process with a long list of criteria.

I’ll admit my own slight bias in the selection. I’m somewhat less interested in traditional technical skill than in inventiveness – in what happens when an artist reaches for something that isn’t supposed to be an art material at all, and in instances when artists find meaningful content in improbable subject matter. Some of the pieces here employ images or objects that may challenge the conventional view of what counts as art, and I kept coming back to those. This exhibition, then, represents one person’s path through a terrific field of entries. It is, I hope, a generous and thoughtful selection. I remain thoroughly impressed that when the Axis Gallery asked a wide, unfiltered public to submit work, the items that came in response were at once more surprising and more complementary than I had any right to expect.

– Sharon Butler, July 2026

ABOUT THE JUROR
Sharon Butler is a painter and the founder of Two Coats of Paint, an award-winning NYC blogazine about painting. She has held solo exhibitions in at CLEA RSKY, Jennifer Baahng Gallery, Theodore Gallery, Pocket Utopia, and Central Fine Arts (all in NYC); in Connecticut at Slater Memorial Museum, Real Art Ways, and Furnace Art on Paper Archive; and in the university galleries at University of Alabama, University of Connecticut, and SUNY Westchester. Her paintings are characterized by a tendency toward Casualism, a term she coined in an article published in The Brooklyn Rail to describe an approach to painting that values imperfection, incompleteness, and process over traditional color theory, pleasing composition, and polished forms.
Her work has been featured in publications such as The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, artcritical, The New Criterion, and New York Magazine. She has received awards from Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation, Yaddo, Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.

She lives and works in Long Island City, Queens.