Selection Jurors will review and rate all artwork submitted. Those with the highest ratings in each category will be featured in the exhibition. Selection jurors include:

Lauren Frances Adams

Visual Artist, Professor at Maryland Institute College of Art

Lauren Frances Adams is a painter and installation artist who teaches painting at Maryland Institute College of Art. She earned her BFA at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and completed her MFA in 2007 at Carnegie Mellon University. She was born in Snow Hill, North Carolina, on a pig farm. She lives and works in Baltimore. Her work engages political and social histories through iconic images and domestic ornament. She has exhibited at Nymans House National Trust (Sussex, England); The Walters Museum in Baltimore; The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, Missouri. Recent projects include Smack Mellon in Brooklyn and a site-specific collaborative public art project with Stewart Watson at a historic tavern museum in Alexandria, Virginia. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and has held residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and the Sacatar Foundation in Brazil. She is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Award, and a 2016 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award. She is the winner of the 2016 Trawick Prize. Her work has been reviewed in Frieze Magazine, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, Artslant, and Hyperallergic. Lauren is a founding member of Ortega y Gasset Projects, a project space in New York.

Clara Lieu

Visual Artist, Adjunct Professor at Rhode Island School of Design and Partner at Artprof.org

Clara Lieu is an Adjunct Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design and a Partner at Artprof.org, a free website for learning visual arts. Her drawing, prints, and sculpture have been exhibited at the International Print Center New York, Bromfield Gallery, the Danforth Museum of Art, Mark Miller Gallery, the Currier Museum of Art, Childs Gallery, and the Davis Museum. Lieu has received artist grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation and the Puffin Foundation. Her work has been profiled on 89.3 KPCC, 90.9 WBUR, Hyperallergic, Artsy, Art New England, and Inside Higher Ed.

Ron Tarver

Photographer, Author and Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Swarthmore College

Ron Tarver received a BA in Journalism and Graphic Arts from Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma and an MFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. He is Visiting Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Swarthmore College. Before joining the faculty at Swarthmore he had been a staff photojournalist at The Philadelphia Inquirer for 32 years where he shares a 2012 Pulitzer Prize. While at the Inquirer he was nominated for three additional Pulitzers and honored with awards from World Press Photos and the Sigma Delta Chi Award of the Society of Professional Journalists among others. He is co-author of the book We Were There: Voices of African American Veterans, published by Harper Collins.

Tarver is recipient of the prestigious Pew Fellowship in the Arts. He has received funding and grants from the National Endowment for the arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and two Independence foundation Fellowships. His fine art work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is included in many museum, corporate and private collections including the National Museum of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Studio Museum In Harlem.

The Awards Juror will determine the award winners in each of the categories.

The Awards Juror for Art of the State: Pennsylvania 2020

Susan E. Cahan

Dean and Professor of Art History, Temple University Tyler School of Art and Architecture

Susan E. Cahan is an art historian, curator and educator who specializes in contemporary art and the history of museums. Her research focuses on the relationship between social and artistic change and the confluence of factors that shape the way culture is imagined, discussed and advanced.  

Cahan served as dean for the arts at Yale College from 2009–2017. Prior to this she was the Des Lee Professor in Contemporary Art and an Associate Dean at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. From 1994–2003, she was a faculty member at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and has served as a visiting professor in the department of art at the University of California, Los Angeles.  

She has over 20 years of experience as a curator and museum professional. From 1996–2001, Cahan served as the senior curator for the private collection of Eileen and Peter Norton and director of arts programs for the Peter Norton Family Foundation. She has held positions at the Museum of Modern Art; the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is a recipient of an Arts Writer's Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, among other awards.   

PhD, Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2003 BA, Art History and English, Tufts University, 1982