Annual Juried Student Exhibition

Main Gallery

Juror: Jen Budney
Each year a prominent Canadian arts professional is invited to jury an exhibition of undergraduate student work. Students gain the professional experience of having their work judged by someone new to their work and having it presented in an exhibition. Jen Budney is Associate Curator at the Mendel Art Gallery. She has held previous positions as Curator at the Kamloops Art Gallery, Program Officer in the Visual Arts at the Canada Council for the Arts, Artistic Director of Gallery 101 (Ottawa), and News Editor of Flash Art magazine. For several years she lived in Milan, Italy, working as a freelance art journalist and curator. Jen frequently collaborates with other curators and artists on projects such as Stranger Knocking (Italian Pavilion, 1st Melbourne International Biennale, 1999, co-curated with Roberto Pinto), Americas Remixed (Fabbrica del Vapore, 2002, co-curated with Euridice Arratia and Franklin Sirmans), the book Unboxed: Engagements in Social Space (2005, edited with Adrian Blackwell), and Wild: Fantasy and Architecture (Waino Aaltonen Museum of Modern Art, Turku, Finland, 2007, co-curated with Jan-Erik Andersson). Her reviews and essays have appeared in a wide array of magazines and journals, including Third Text, Parkett, Nka: Contemporary African Art, and Art Asia & Pacific. She has contributed texts to many artists’ monographs and exhibition catalogues, including those of Garry Neill Kennedy, Lucy Orta, Maria Thereza Alves, and, most recently, the travelling exhibition NeoHoodoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith. Jen has a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and an MA in Anthropology from Carleton University, where her thesis focused on racial attitudes and access/participation in Brazilian contemporary art.