“U-Pick Pumpkin, Sauvie Island” by Alan Mevis struck juror MJ Koreiva as a thoughtful image about our landscape. The little girl’s pose seems to ask, “Does this grow here, too?” Contributed Photo

When Oregon State University selected the jurors for its traveling show, “Art About Agriculture,” they fielded a trio of professionals.

Juror Margaret Coe’s paintings are seen throughout the nation in museums, exhibitions and private collections. From the world of academia, OSU art professor Yuji Hiratsuka brought more than 30 years of printmaking expertise to the jurying process.

And MJ Koreiva, former director of the Coos Art Museum, was invited as a result of CAM’s impressive reputation for maintaining a busy calendar of juried exhibitions.

OSU’s curator, Shelley Curtis, contacted Koreiva in 2005 while searching for fine art with an “aquaculture” theme. At Koreiva’s invitation, Curtis toured CAM’s 2006 Maritime Exhibition, and the two discussed the virtues of clam digging as a valid agricultural pursuit.

A month later, Curtis called for artists to consider both the sea and the land for the 2007 “Art About Agriculture” show. She said that during their examination of the challenges and idealism of agriculture, artists should look to Oregon’s latticework of rivers, mountains, shorelines and fields to develop the theme “By Land and By Sea.”

I asked Koreiva to describe some of the surprises and constraints she encountered during the “blind jury” process for this traveling “Art About Agriculture” show.

From her computer she brought up the gallery of thumbnails available online from OSU, and then she described the set-up: digital images; 150 dots per inch; no identification except to state the medium. No indication of artist, location, or dimension. For the jurors, it was a two-step event. Curtis, Coe, Hiratsuka and Koreiva gathered at OSU in Corvallis last January, settled down with a digital projector, and screened 514 jpeg files.

“We each did our own tally,” Koreiva recalls. “Then we compared. We didn’t do it frivolously. If a digital image earned two out of three votes, it moved into the next round.”

The jurors looked and tallied. Studied, and tallied again. They worked eight hours straight through, and after four rounds, they took a final look at their most recent edits. They compared their picks, and decided which entries would move forward to the finals.

Artists were contacted. Original art was crated, shipped to OSU, unwrapped, and the jurors met again to determine the purchase and honor awards.

Again, they clocked in for eight hours as they toured the original art. “We didn’t try to politicize each other,” Koreiva said. “We each went separately. We were kids in a candy store, looking at really good work.” “Giant Pacific Octopus II” is an etching that surprised Koreiva. “This was really powerful in person,” she says, “but not so much in the digital.” Created by Eugene artist Tallmadge Doyle, the etching was awarded both the OSU President’s and 2007 Jurors’ Purchase awards.

Coe, Hiratsuka and Koreiva fulfilled their final commitment to the blind jury process in April, when they spoke during the exhibit’s opening reception on the OSU campus. There, Koreiva revealed that her favorite part of the evening was a slow circuit of the reception floor, as guests and artists encountered the jurors’ selections.

“It’s fun to hear the comments ... what speaks to certain people. The best thing is when someone says, ‘I can hear it.’ You know, the creaking boats. Or when they say they can smell the field. It’s when that other sense kicks in.”

And so the harvest of paintings and prints, sculptures and photographs is in. “Art About Agriculture” is on display at CAM through Dec. 1, and the public is invited to experience this year’s crop of insightful and inventive images. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday, at 235 Anderson Ave., in Coos Bay.