PASADENA, CALIFORNIA.- The California Art Club’s 94th Annual Gold Medal Juried Exhibition, one of the country’s premier juried displays of contemporary-traditional fine art paintings and sculptures, will be on view at the Pasadena Museum of California Art from October 17 through January 9, 2005. A Preview Reception with the Artists will be held on Saturday, October 16, the evening before the exhibition opens to the public.

Due to increasing interest in representational works of art, organizers of this year’s Gold Medal Exhibition have extended the exhibition period from three weeks to three months, and will offer a series of lectures and demonstrations for collectors of traditional fine art.
The exhibition coincides with “The Tender Land: A Festival of Art, History, Music and Science,” the City of Pasadena’s four-month-long collaboration among 30 cultural organizations, which highlights mankind’s ever-evolving relationship with nature.

“The Pasadena Museum of California Art is extremely pleased to be presenting this year’s Gold Medal Exhibition in conjunction with our display for the Tender Land Festival, which will feature paintings of Pasadena by early members of the California Art Club,” said Wesley Jessup, the Museum’s Executive Director. “Many of these historic paintings, which are from the collection of The Irvine Museum, were created by artists instrumental in the Club’s founding in 1909,” he added.

Jessup served as a juror for this year’s exhibition along with other art experts and professional curators, including Suzanne Bellah, Director, Carnegie Art Museum; Amy Scott, Curator of Visual Arts, Autry National Center; Jean Stern, Executive Director, The Irvine Museum; and Dr. Michael Zakian, Director, Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University.

The jury selected the 116 paintings and 18 sculptures to be showcased in the exhibition, which has no theme, continuing a practice initiated by 19th century European art salons to encourage artists to take artistic risks and create what they consider to be their most important works.

The Preview Reception with the Artists on Saturday, October 16, from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. will provide an opportunity for art patrons to meet the participating artists and be among the first to acquire the works of art available for purchase. Tickets for the reception are $125 per person and include a copy of the exhibition’s extensive catalogue, which documents the careers of the exhibiting artists and features a scholarly essay by Dr. Deborah Epstein Solon, which is entitled “Purely Academic: The Training of California Painters at Home and Abroad.”
Dr. Solon will discuss this essay as one of the special programs offered by the Club during this exhibition. Other programs include a lecture about the creation of gilded frames for traditional fine art, as well as demonstrations on life sculpting and pastel portraiture.