If you read the Guardian’s recent evisceration of the Royal Academy summer exhibition – “a miserable garden party of vapid good taste” – and felt bad for the artists involved, spare a thought for the ones who didn’t even make the grade.
Because while the RA selected 1,700 artworks to go on display this year, almost 10 times that number were rejected. Which means someone out there deemed them to have been of a lesser quality than the ones our critic Jonathan Jones labelled as “tepid, polite and pointless”. Ouch!
Feel bad no longer. Because some of those poor, passed-over souls are about to see their rejected work get a second chance in a show that doesn’t so much lean into the idea of rejection as collapse wilfully into its arms.
“I kept seeing people on Instagram posting these amazing pieces of artwork saying they’d been rejected,” says gallerist Shona Bland. “It was such a shame that they weren’t going to go on display. I thought I’d do something about it.”
Bland put a call out for other artists whose work failed to make the RA cut, and soon amassed a small but talented pool whose rejected work this year encompasses everything from homoerotic screen prints to underwater photography.
“Being rejected is a huge part of being an artist,” says Bland. “It’s not really a reflection on the quality of the artwork.” Indeed, the list of names who have previously received the cold shoulder from the show includes Édouard Manet, RA president Rebecca Salter and Banksy, who was rejected from the 2018 exhibition after sending in a piece of work under the anagrammatic name Bryan S Gaakman (the academy eventually hung his work after asking him to resend it under his famous name).
Hannah Pratt has been rejected by the RA “four or five” times now. “Rejection is a feeling I know very well, let’s put it that way!” she says, somewhat perkily. Being part of the RA summer exhibition is a big deal for Pratt. As a child, her mum would take her to see it every year and she longs to be able to point out her own work up on the walls. “It would be a lovely milestone,” she concedes. “And professionally speaking, it’s a show that a lot of gallerists and collectors attend.”
Pratt started off as a painter but has gradually moved through different media to arrive at what she does now: complex textile work inspired by her love of science. This year’s rejected work is part of her Colour of Starlight series, in which she uses AI to work out the colours of constellations and then creates a piece from threads that match those colours. It’s beautiful, technically challenging work – so does it get her down when she sees some of the ropey stuff that does get accepted into the RA show?
“Well I’m going to be diplomatic and say there are things in there that aren’t to my taste,” she says. “But there are always gems. And the quality of the work, on the whole, is really good. It’s all executed very nicely.”
Pratt says art schools help toughen artists up because you are constantly forced to justify your work to the tutors. Even so, when she first faced failure, it hurt. “Artists are generally sensitive, and yet we are required to have quite thick skins,” she says. Sometimes rejection can be especially tough for Pratt. “I’ve quite bad dyslexia and dyspraxia, so if I need to write a very long funding application, it often will take me days. You can be like, ‘Oh man, that took ages!’ But generally I’ve learned to shake it off and move on to the next thing. There are always other opportunities out there.”
The reason Bland wanted to put on the Rejects show is that her own experience in the art world is one of rejection: “I don’t have an art history degree and because of that I was never given a chance in the industry,” she says. In the end she set up her own gallery, ArtFriend, which has blossomed into a welcoming space for creatives and art lovers who might normally be put off by the industry’s snobbery and art-speak. Rejection can be positive, she says, pointing out that had she been accepted for some of the many jobs she’d applied for she might never have had the opportunity to follow this passion project.
Another artist in the show, Craig Keenan, makes cyanotypes, a camera-less type of photography that uses UV light and iron salts to create brilliant blue prints. Keenan says that he found a lot of early success as an artist – he was often accepted or shortlisted for various prizes and exhibitions. So when the RA told him his work would not be part of their summer show seven years ago, it felt like a serious blow. “I took it really personally,” he says. “But in a way it got me used to being rejected, which is all part of being an artist.”
These days he’s much more accepting about how his work does. “All of my work is blue and white,” he says. “Of course it’s not going to be for everyone.”
It also probably helps that Keenan has seen both sides of the RA summer show – his work has been rejected several times but also accepted on two occasions. He’s living proof that being rejected doesn’t mean you will always be rejected in future.
Lifting the taboo surrounding rejection is something that Bland hopes to achieve with her show. She has even made a line of “REJECTS” badges and tote bags. And, on Instagram, artists have been opening up in the comment sections about their past failures. According to Bland, around 400 artists applied to be in this year’s show, which is far more than she has space for.
So hang on a minute … does that mean some people were rejected from the REJECTS show?!
“Ummm, yeah,” says Bland, a little nervously, before deciding. “Maybe it could just keep going, with a rejects’ show for these rejects?”
