Jurors
Dr. Jerry N. Smith - Chief Curator
(Dayton, OH) -
Jerry N. Smith is Chief Curator and Director of Education at The Dayton Art Institute, where he has served since September 2017. He previously worked as Chief Curator and Interim Director at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida, and for more than a decade as curator of American and European art at Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona. Smith has overseen more than 60 museum exhibitions ranging from Leonardo da Vinci to Andy Warhol, and diverse topics that include Art of the Classical Guitar, Nineteenth-Century New Mexican Retablos and Dorothy Height’s Hats. Publications include Howard Post: Western Perspectives (2013), Don Coen: The Migrant Series (2014), “Aligning Authority with Responsibility for Interpretation” with Kathryn Blake and Christian Adame in Visitor-Centered Exhibitions and Edu-Curation in Art Museums (2017) and most recently an essay for the exhibition catalogue Ralston Crawford: Air & Space & War (2021). Smith received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art history from Arizona State University and his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas with the dissertation Auto-America: The Automobile and American Art, circa 1900–1950.
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Toby Gotesman Schneier - Painter
(Ft. Lauderdale, FL) - Toby Gotesman Schneier is an American Expressionist painter, based in South Florida, known for her unique ability to transform objects, people, scenes & events into jarring and provocative works of art. Her sense of irony, beauty and enormous inequity always make for a symphony of unexpected scenes, image & faces. The paintings are fearless and out-of-the-box, while continuously and predominantly remaining relevant. Her compassion for the human condition, as well as her indefatigable belief in a higher power, are conspicuous throughout the work. It has been noted that her art evokes a poignant sense of nostalgia and sentiment, even longing, in the viewer, as her paintings appear to be laced with familiarity, humanity, and a heightened sense of irony and collective injustice.
Her unabashed use of color and shape, as well as her keen ability to shock the viewer into some sort of action with her bold and direct imagery are best seen in her Homeless, Holocaust, Racial Inequality & HIV/AIDS Collections. Emotionally & artistically captivated by racial, gender, political,& religious inequity, the artist somehow inserts & embeds a level of “coding”& “mission” into her paintings. One never knows for certain whether the area in question was accidental or purely strategic on the her part. This intriguing symbolism has become a signature of her work.
Toby Gotesman Schneier’s paintings are housed in private collections and have been exhibited in museums & galleries nationwide.
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Ed Dixon - Art Gallery Owner
(Dayton, OH) - Ed Dixon is a native Daytonian and opened the Edward A. Dixon Gallery in the Fall of 2017 in Downtown Dayton, Ohio. After years of involvement in the music, film and fashion industry, Ed decided to turn his attention to his passion for visual art and began the curation of artwork from artists on a world-wide scale. He has curated and hosted multiple shows at the gallery that have included artists such as Sabrina Terence, Ronnie Williams, Marilynn Page, Erica Arndts and the late, legendary Beatles animator Ron Campbell. Exhibition themes at the gallery have included We’re Doing It ALL Wrong and JOY (That’s Just What I needed). He also served on panels for exhibitions and artist grants such as Art of Soul! Juried Art Show presented by NAAMCC , the Ohio Art League Fall Show and the Culture Works Special Projects Grant.
Ed spends much of his time promoting the visual arts, he serves on the Dayton Art Institute Collections Committee, the Executive Committee for the Dayton Sister City Committee, maintains his realtor license, serves in an advisory role for the Dayton Emerging Fashion Incubator, writes for his travel blog and is an avid investor. Additionally, Ed is a patron and a member of several local art organizations including the Dayton Society of Artists, the African-American Visual Arts Guild, The Contemporary and the Dayton Art Institute, as well as, the Cincinnati Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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