A Mobile artist has taken home top honors in one of Alabama’s largest juried art competitions. Brad Robertson won the Non-Representational Award for his piece “Up to the Wall” in the 11th annual Energen “The Wonders of Alabama Art” competition, organizers announced this week — placing the Mobile artist among the five category winners recognized statewide this year.
The award puts Robertson’s work in front of an audience far beyond the Port City. The Wonders of Alabama Art competition, sponsored by the Birmingham-based energy company Energen, draws entries from across the state and has become a fixture of Alabama’s visual arts calendar, offering artists something relatively rare in the region: a juried, corporate-supported platform with a permanent home for its winners.
The award places Robertson among five category winners recognized this year in a competition that set a participation record for 2010, drawing 391 entries from 223 artists across the state. A jury narrowed the field to 203 works for the final round of judging, with artists representing 32 of Alabama’s 67 counties submitting pieces. The numbers describe the competition’s reach: nearly half of Alabama’s counties sent artists, and the field spanned every stage of artistic career from emerging to established.
Juried competitions of this scale serve a filtering function that individual galleries cannot. With nearly 400 entries judged in stages, the selection process forces works to compete first against the entire statewide field and then against the survivors — a two-tier test that gives the resulting exhibition a claim to represent the strongest work being made in Alabama that year. For artists, inclusion on the other side of that filter is itself a credential.
A Statewide Showcase, With a Local Connection
The selected artwork, including Robertson’s winning piece, was featured in a free public exhibition at Energen Plaza in downtown Birmingham. The show was open to visitors Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and closed April 9. The weekday hours made the exhibition an office-downtown event — accessible to the thousands who work in Birmingham’s central business district and to visitors passing through the city’s civic core.
Free admission has been a consistent feature of the competition’s public showing, and it matters. Eliminating the ticket barrier turns the exhibition into something commuters and lunch crowds encounter by accident, spreading exposure for the winning artists well beyond the audience that would seek out a gallery deliberately. For a Mobile artist, that kind of upstate visibility is hard to purchase.
As one of the five category winners, Robertson’s piece will join the permanent Alabama Collection housed at Energen Plaza, giving his work a lasting home in the state’s corporate art holdings. The permanent collection distinguishes the Wonders of Alabama Art from most juried shows, where exhibitions end and works return to studios. Winners here see their pieces enter a collection that hangs year-round in a downtown Birmingham landmark, viewed daily by employees and visitors long after the competition closes.
For Mobile’s arts community, Robertson’s win extends a pattern of Gulf Coast representation in the statewide competition. Mobile’s gallery scene — anchored by the LoDa arts district, the Mobile Museum of Art, and a deep bench of working artists — has long produced painters whose work competes successfully at the state level, and each statewide recognition strengthens the argument that the city’s artists deserve a place in conversations often dominated by Birmingham and Huntsville.
About the Competition
Now in its 11th year, the Wonders of Alabama Art competition has become one of the state’s most established platforms for recognizing Alabama artists. It is open to artists 18 and older who currently live in Alabama or have lived in the state, a residency rule that keeps the competition rooted in Alabama talent while allowing the state’s many artists who trained elsewhere or moved away to remain connected to it.
Entries must be original two-dimensional works completed within the previous three years, a requirement that keeps the exhibition focused on current production rather than career retrospectives. Eligible media include oil, acrylic, watercolor, pastels, pen and ink, and mixed media — a lineup covering the traditional foundations of painting and drawing while leaving room for contemporary mixed-media practice.
The structure of the competition — categories rather than a single best-in-show — shapes what audiences see. Dividing the field into categories lets a watercolorist compete against watercolorists and a mixed-media artist against peers in the same discipline, and it guarantees that the winning exhibition represents a range of approaches rather than the taste of a single jury preference.
The Non-Representational category, which Robertson’s “Up to the Wall” won, recognizes abstract or non-objective work that does not depict recognizable people, places or objects — a category that rewards artists pushing beyond traditional representational painting. In Alabama’s art landscape, where landscape painting, Southern scenes, and figuration hold strong popular appeal, a dedicated non-representational category gives abstract artists a fair field rather than forcing them to compete for attention against more immediately familiar imagery.
Abstract work also poses particular demands on juries. Without subject matter to describe, judgment turns on composition, color, surface, and the coherence of an artist’s formal decisions — qualities that separate serious abstraction from decoration. Winning the category means Robertson’s piece persuaded the jury on precisely those grounds.
What the Win Means
For Robertson, the award combines immediate recognition with a permanent legacy. Category winners collect the honor of the year’s record-setting competition — 391 entries, 223 artists, 32 counties — and the assurance that “Up to the Wall” will hang in the Alabama Collection at Energen Plaza indefinitely. That combination of a competition win and a permanent public placement is among the most durable forms of recognition available to a working artist in the state.
For Mobile, the win is a reminder that the city’s artistic production travels. The state’s largest juried competitions and its permanent collections are concentrated in Birmingham, and regional artists rely on wins like this one to carry their reputations across county lines. Robertson’s Non-Representational Award now sits in that pipeline, representing both his own work and the Mobile scene that produced it.
The 11th edition’s record participation also says something about the health of the state’s visual arts community. A competition that can nearly double its entries over a decade — drawing artists from two-thirds of Alabama’s counties — reflects both the sponsor’s long-term commitment and a growing population of working artists across the state who see the competition as worth entering. For 2010, at least, the strongest of the state’s abstract work came from Mobile.
Corporate art sponsorship plays a quiet but significant role in Alabama’s cultural economy, and the Energen competition is a leading example of the model. State arts funding in Alabama has historically ranked among the lowest in the nation, leaving competitions, exhibitions, and permanent collections dependent on private underwriting. A company that commits to an annual juried show, a free public exhibition, and a permanent collection is filling a gap that public institutions cannot, and the consistency — eleven years running — is what turns a sponsorship into an institution.
The permanent collection at Energen Plaza also functions as a record of the state’s artistic production over time. Year by year, the five category winners create a running archive of what Alabama’s artists were making in each era — a museum of the present assembled one competition at a time. Robertson’s “Up to the Wall” now forms part of that record for a year that set participation records, one of five works chosen from a field of nearly four hundred.
For working artists, competitions like this also carry practical career weight. Jurors, gallery owners, and collectors across the region track the results of the state’s major shows, and a category win frequently leads to invitations — group exhibitions, teaching opportunities, commissions — that never appear in the award announcement itself. The visibility of hanging in a downtown Birmingham lobby five days a week compounds the effect, putting the winning artist’s name in front of an audience of professionals who pass the collection daily.
The competition’s residency rule deserves a final note as well. By opening the field to anyone who currently lives in Alabama or has lived in the state, the Wonders of Alabama Art keeps a door open for the many Alabama-born artists working in Atlanta, New Orleans, Nashville, and beyond — treating the state’s artistic diaspora as part of its talent pool rather than excluding it.
The free exhibition’s downtown Birmingham setting completed the circuit the competition envisions: Alabama art made by artists from across 32 counties, shown in the state’s largest city, judged by a professional jury, and preserved for the public in a permanent collection. For Brad Robertson and Mobile, the April 9 close of the exhibition marked the end of the show but not the honor — his winning piece now belongs to the collection, and to the state’s artistic record, for good.