The University of Tennessee at Martin’s ninth annual Bellwethers Juried Exhibition of Collegiate Student Art will open Monday, Oct. 19, and run through Friday, Nov. 13, at the West Tennessee Regional Art Center at 1200 E. Main St. in Humboldt.
The closing reception and awards ceremony will be held from 5 to 7 p.m., Nov. 13. Awards will be presented at 6:30 p.m.
The Lane Last Award for Best in Show winner will receive a $200 award. First place winners in the 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional artworks will receive $125, second-place winners in each category will receive $75, and third-place winners in each category will receive $50.
Jed Jackson is the juror for this year’s exhibition. He received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in 1980 and his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Memphis College of Art in 1977.
Jackson was awarded a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison, Maine, in 1974. He has taught painting, art history, art theory, and critical thinking and humanities courses at the university and college level for 42 years.
Jackson has held teaching positions at New York University (1986-90) and Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (1990-99). He is a professor emeritus of painting at the University of Memphis, having served as a professor there since 1999 and as chair of the Department of Art and Design from 1999 to 2006. As a senior accreditation evaluator, Jackson has served the National Association of Schools of Art and Design since 2004.
Jackson is the author of the book “Art: A Comparative Study,” first published in 1994. His landscape and figurative oil paintings embody realism with a distinctive twist.
Bellwethers is a regional juried exhibition of collegiate student art held annually by UT Martin’s Department of Visual and Theatre Arts in collaboration with the West Tennessee Regional Art Center.
Originally known as Artists of the 21st Century, this event was created by the late Lane Last, former professor of graphic design, in 2000 as a way for college art students in the region to see how they measure up against students from other programs under the professional review of an outside juror.
In 2018, Artists of the 21st Century was rebranded as Bellwethers. The word “bellwether,” derived from a Middle English word that referred to a lead sheep in a flock with a bell around its neck, is often used to designate a leader or indicator of trends within a geographic region.
In 2024, the UT Martin faculty created the Lane Last Award for Best in Show to honor Last’s many years of support of the department and this exhibition. In 2025, programming for the exhibition was assumed by the newly-formed Center for Southern Art, an academic center located in the Department of Visual and Theatre Arts on the UT Martin campus that is devoted to the cultivation of excellence in the visual art of the South.
The Bellwethers 2026 exhibition is open to all undergraduate art students enrolled in a visual arts program at two-year or four-year institutions in Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia. Students who have graduated from one of these programs within the past six months are also eligible to submit.
Work entered must have been produced during the student’s undergraduate enrollment period, must have been created solely by the artist and must have been finished within the last two years. Media may include painting, drawing, sculpture, glass, ceramics, photography, printmaking, digital art, fibers, mixed media and jewelry.
For more information about the UT Martin Department of Visual and Theatre Arts, visit www.utm.edu/vta.
For more information about UT Martin, visit www.utm.edu or call 731-881-7000.
