Glasstire Opens Call for Its 2019 Art Writing Prize

by Glasstire August 25, 2019

Glasstire Art Writing Prize in Texas

Glasstire is pleased to announce the 2019 Glasstire Art Writing Prize, a competitive award designed to find and highlight emerging arts writers in Texas. This is the second year of the Prize, which will for this cycle again focus on the North Texas region, with plans to expand to San Antonio in 2020. (It will eventually be Texas-wide.) The winner of the Prize will be awarded $2,500, and their work will be published on Glasstire. In addition, they will be honored at a cocktail party on November 7, 2019 in Dallas.

The Glasstire Art Writing Prize is awarded to a senior undergraduate or graduate student at a Texas university. For this open call, students from art history, journalism, studio arts, philosophy, and literature departments at participating universities in the Dallas/Fort Worth area will be invited to submit articles, starting today, August 25. The deadline is October 11, 2019 at 11:59 pm. Any questions about the prize can be directed to Glasstire’s editorial staff at [email protected].

Judges for this round of the Prize include Jeremy Strick, Director of the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas; Terri Thornton, Curator of Education at the Modern Art Museum of  Fort Worth; Brandon Zech, Publisher of Glasstire; Christina Rees, Editor-in-Chief of Glasstire; and Christopher Blay, News Editor of Glasstire. 

How to Enter
Entrants must submit one article, with a word count of between 750 and 1200 words, about a work of art that they love, and why. Only one submission per author will be considered. Please submit your article as either a Word document or PDF to [email protected]. Please do not include any identifying information (name, school, etc.) in the document file, as all submissions will be juried blindly.

Eligibility
Submission is open to all writers currently enrolled in universities and colleges in the North Texas region (schools within a 60-mile radius of Dallas or Fort Worth) who are either undergraduate seniors or are in any graduate-level (Masters degree or PhD) program. Writers will be considered ineligible after five years of relevant art-related employment (for example a curatorial or other professional position in a museum or history of paid arts writing as a freelancer or editor). Allowance can be made for periods devoted to family obligations or extended illness, at the discretion of the jury.

Criteria
Articles submitted for the prize must be previously unpublished and it is expected that the winning article will be published on Glasstire.

Keep in mind that Glasstire publishes journalistic arts writing. Preference will be shown for interesting, opinionated prose that eschews academic jargon. Ask yourself if this is something you would want to read.

Last Year’s Prize

Last year’s winner was Melanie Shi, a student of Philosophy at the University of North Texas in Denton, who wrote about The Color Inside, a skyspace artwork by American artist James Turrell.

Here’s an excerpt from her submission, titled Eye to Eye:

“In a modern way of living that so values productivity and forward advancement via technology, it is difficult to justify taking out an hour in an evening just to watch the sun set. Turrell’s ‘The Color Inside’ offers this experience, and reminds us of why it is important. It encourages the viewer to reflect — to reflect on reflection, to notice the very essence of how she is seeing through color. It does so using the play of light and the viewer’s vision alone, suggesting that artwork can be an event instead of a material thing. In fact, it can only be experienced in person.”

On the importance of arts writing, Christina Rees wrote last year, at the inaugural Prize’s announcement, in her op-ed Why We Need Art Writers Now (More Than Ever):

“The Glasstire Art Writing Prize… can encourage and cultivate the voices who are interested in engaging with the vast amount of visual art that this state churns out. Artists not only deserve honest critical writing about their work. They want it. The best artists, especially, want it. And the glossy lifestyle magazines and ‘curated’ Insta-sites that only embrace the forced glamor and fluff around visual art aren’t giving them (or art fans) this, or starting any meaningful conversation around art and what it can actually do in our culture. Given our current political moment, this problem of lack of real dialogue is especially galling.”

The inaugural 2018 prize was generously sponsored by Lindsey and Patrick Collins; Laura and Walter Elcock; Elisabeth and Panos Karpidas; Jana and Hadley Paul; and Cindy and Howard Rachofsky. 100% of the funds raised for the 2019 prize will go to North Texas writing in the coming year.

0 comment

You may also like

Leave a Comment

Funding generously provided by: