Juried Shows

Since its inception in 1969, FIRST STREET GALLERY has held juried exhibitions for nonmember artists. These shows provide emerging and mid-career artists, as well as artists with established backgrounds outside of major art centers, with exposure to the New York City art community, its curators and collectors, other artists, critics, and the gallery-going public. The artists’ work is shown in the gallery, shared on social media, and publicized in communications to the gallery’s extensive contacts nationwide.

SELECTS 2024

FIRST STREET GALLERY is pleased to announce a new juried show opportunity for nonmember artists. Modeled on the Gallery’s “9 for 19” juried exhibitions of the past four seasons, SELECTS 2024, opening January 4, 2024, will offer selected artists the opportunity to show a display of representative works in an installation of their own design. Each artist will have a 10 foot by 10 foot area of wall space (not necessarily contiguous) or an equivalent amount of floor space for 3D works, in which they may, within reason, use their space in whatever manner they feel shows their work to its best advantage.

Entry closed.


National Juried Exhibition

Initiated decades ago, the annual National Juried Exhibition is open to nonmember U.S. resident artists, working in a diverse range of two and three dimensional media. Recent past jurors include nationally prominent art critics (Jed Perl, Lance Esplund); artists (Clintel Steed, Paul Resika, Ronnie Landfield); art historians (Dore Ashton, Donald Kuspit); curators and gallerists specializing in contemporary works (Steven Harvey, Lori Bookstein, Peter Colon of DC Moore, Nancy Margolis, Andrew Arnot, Thomas Erben).

This year’s exhibition will have a theme, Nocturne (‘Night’), chosen by the Juror. See the Prospectus for the range of imagery and emotion expressed in music and art on this theme and a selection of stylistically very different artists who have interpreted it.

Our juror for 2023 is Susanna Coffey. Susanna Coffey has been a Visiting Professor of Painting in Columbia University’s School of Visual Art since 2013. She recently retired as the F.H. Sellers Professor in Painting at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Coffey received her BFA magna cum laude from the University of Connecticut and MFA from Yale University School of Art. A respected figurative painter, her works in self-portraiture are investigations of the iconic human head. This work is driven by questions about what a portrait image can mean. Meticulously observed, her image appears in many guises and environments. Some portraits seem almost entirely abstract with only the barest suggestion of a human face. Night Painting, a book of Coffey’s nocturnal landscapes with essays, poems and prose poems by Dr. Carol Becker, Brice Brown, Jane Coffey, Jane Kenyon and Mark Strand was recently published in a second edition by MAB Books. Currently she is working with The Leroy Neiman Center for Print Studies on a series of woodcut illustrations for Apostolos Athanassakis’ English translation of The Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Coffey’s self-portraits are in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, The National Portrait Gallery, National Academy of Design, The Hood Museum, The Honolulu Museum of Art, Minneapolis Museum of Art, The Weatherspoon Art Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, and others. This year she was one of the recipients of the “Artist x Artist Award” given by the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Other awards include the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts Award, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award. Her exhibitions have been written about in The New York Times, Art in America, Art News, the New Yorker, Hyperallergic, and other publications. She is represented in New York by Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects, Alpha Gallery in Boston, and Galeria Isabel Ignacio in Seville, Spain.

Entry closed.

Affiliate Membership –