Art juror Terrie Corbett keeps an open mind for Bicentennial exhibit

by themoneyoffice2.com@gmail.com March 23, 2024 · Art

Multitalented artist Terrie Corbett advocates for the Tallahassee arts community by serving as an art juror and sharing her art-making knowledge and joy with the world.

Corbett served as the exhibition juror for this year’s Creative Tallahassee: the Tallahassee Bicentennial exhibit, featuring over 50 individual artworks never before shown at the City Hall Art Gallery. An Opening Reception & Awards Ceremony for the exhibit is set for Thursday, April 11.

Curating space for bicentennial exhibit

The stars of an art exhibit are, rightfully so, the artists. From the second you enter a gallery, your eye is drawn to the artwork hanging on the wall or placed on the pedestals. As you move from piece to piece, you experience a nice flow through the space as you investigate each image with ease and purpose.

You notice descriptive narratives by some works and award ribbons by others. Exhibition curators and jurors from across the country smile as they read this, knowing their critical role in building an experience that honors the artists, showcases the art, and guides the viewer’s eye through the space. They are the unsung heroes of the art world.

With multiple exhibition showings across the region and a lifetime of artmaking and education under her belt, artist Corbett gives a glimpse at how art curators and jurors approach their work. For Corbett, art curation is all about preparation. Before ever stepping foot into the exhibition space, a curator must be able to identify artists of interest, create a proposal for their work, select a space, communicate with artists and galleries, and map out the logistics from parking to hanging paintings.

“Being prepared to put a show together and all that that entails is necessary when curating an exhibition. When an unexpected opportunity presents itself, you have to be ready to pull together a proposal and select the artists fairly quickly,” says Corbett.

These skills, combined with Corbett’s art history, technique, and process knowledge, make her an asset as a juror for this year’s Creative Tallahassee exhibition. Though admittedly subjective, Corbett describes her role as a juror as discovering innovative, skillful work derived from this year’s theme for Creative Tallahassee: the Tallahassee Bicentennial.

“Most importantly, it must excite or move you in some way through composition, design, color, value, expression, or technique.”

Corbett approaches every show she juries with an open mind and an intrigued eye, traits she has carried into her own artwork. “I do not take the position that ‘this is the way you paint a tree, a landscape, a figure,’ “ Corbett said. “Art history (shows] the variety of ways that those subjects have been expressed. I am interested in the way the subjects are interpreted by the artist – whether it is realistic or abstracted or somewhere in between.”

Shaped by mentors and everyday inspiration

Like the artwork in an exhibition, each artist has been curated, cultivated, and juried by the individuals they meet and work with. Corbett credits many mentors along the way for her success as an artist.

Early on, her first grade teacher introduced her to the beauty and excitement art held. Her grandmother showed her how to make T-shirt dolls that she later turned into a mummy, including a fully painted sarcophagus, with the help of her father for her third grade history project.

During her time at university, her professor, Dr. Daryl Patrick, opened her eyes to the masterful artworks exhibited by museums, while her other professor, Gaddis Geeslin, encouraged the unlimited possibilities artists could explore. Corbett received her Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Masters in Fine Arts in painting and drawing from Sam Houston State University.

Painting with feeling, vibrant color

She always passes along the advice of those who shaped her. “Gaddis Geeslin was a wonderful human, my mentor, and a very fine painter. He said, ‘You know the way you feel when you are petting your kitten and it is purring?’” Corbett said. “Bring that feeling and that touch with you when you are applying the paint to the surface.”

Be it the way nature soothes her soul, the mindfulness found in the works of masters, or the joyfulness experienced by children, like the artists she juries, Corbett finds inspiration all around her. She paints while playing music, to help her connect to the process and create pieces with vibrancy that jumps off the canvas.

For Corbett, color is critical. “Color plays a major role in art and in my own work. It brings emotion and energy to a piece,” says Corbett. Her mixture of pigments to achieve a particular value to the color, along with her personal “mark-making” technique, establishes abstract expressive pieces shaped by intuition and connection. Corbett’s artwork varies across mediums, using encaustic, oil, wax painting, and layered graphite.

Advocating for community arts

Corbett continues to pay it forward by teaching at universities and in the community while advocating for the arts. “We need that now more than ever,” Corbett said.

Over the years, she has served on multiple boards, including the LeMoyne Center for the Visual Arts, the 621 Gallery, and the statewide organization, The Florida Artists Group. Additionally, Corbett has worked as the artist liaison on the Florida Committee for the National Museum of Women in the Arts and held multiple committee chairs for the former Artists’ League of FSU MoFA. Currently, she serves as a member of the Artists League of the Big Bend (ALBB) and as Chairman of the Professional Development Award.

One organization Corbett is honored to work with and support is the Council on Culture and Arts and Creative Tallahassee, its annual juried art exhibition of 2-D and 3-D media at the City Hall Art Gallery. For the past 18 years, this annual exhibition has featured over 700 artists and 1,000 artworks from some of the most exciting and creative artists in the Big Bend area, celebrating the skill, talent, and ingenuity they share across mediums.

This year, Creative Tallahassee bolstered the Bicentennial by asking artists to submit ambitious artwork that interprets how 200 years of Tallahassee history has shaped the community’s past, present, and future.

Corbett served as the exhibition juror for over 50 individual artworks never before shown at the City Hall Art Gallery. Her eye for identifying engaging new work, ambition to mentor young artists and deep knowledge of Tallahassee and its art community made her the top juror choice this year.

Stop by City Hall in coming weeks to see her choices and view this year’s special selection of Bicentennial-themed art made by our community of creative Tallahasseeans.