2021 Juror: Julio César Morales

Juror’s Statement:

It was with great pleasure to be the juror for the 2021 Annual Student Juried Online Exhibition for the Department of Art, Design, and Visual Studies at Boise State University. During these unprecedented times we/us in the art world have it look at alternative ways to showcase and champion exhibitions on virtual levels as well as the traditional modes of representing artists working today. 

I was very inspired by the works submitted by the students both on a technical level and also on a conceptual level. The influence by our current social climate was very visible in the works and was astonished by the mix of personal and global perspectives and narratives in the work. 

If there is one thing that we can all learn from our experiences on 2020 is your voices need to be in the forefront with art as a form of social activism and engaging with important issues. Through art we need to be brave enough to a hear all voices in the same mix in order to venture into a new unknown future that can lead to innovative solutions and position artists at the center of these conversations. 

Thank you again for the invitation! – Julio César Morales

About juror Julio César Morales:

Employing a range of media and visual strategies, artist, educator, and curator Julio César Morales explores issues of migration, underground economies, and labor, on personal and global scales. Morales’s artwork has been shown at Lyon Biennale (Lyon, France); Istanbul Biennale (Turkey); Los Angeles County Art Museum; Singapore Biennale; Frankfurter Kunstverein (Frankfurt, Germany); Prospect 3 (New Orleans, Louisiana) SFMOMA (San Francisco); Perez Art Museum (Miami, Florida); and The UCLA Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), amongst others. His work has been written about in Flash Art, The New York Times, Artforum, Frieze, Art Nexus, and Art in America. His work is in private and public collections including MoMA, The Los Angeles County Art Museum, The Kadist Foundation, The San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, and Deutsche Bank. Morales was Adjunct Professor at The San Francisco Art Institute and Associate Professor in Curatorial Studies at The California College for the Arts. Morales is an advisor and writer for The San Francisco Quarterly Art Magazine; from 2008 to 2012 he was Adjunct Curator for Visual Arts at Yerba Buena Center for The Arts in San Francisco. Morales was a contributing curator for the Japanese pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale. He was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant in 2020 and is represented by Gallery Wendi Norris. He is currently Curator at the ASU Art Museum at Arizona State University.