"The mark is alive and well.  I’m positively convinced of that after having had the privilege and challenge of jurying The Living Mark at Verum Ultimum.  It was incredibly difficult and even painful to whittle down a field of hundreds of extraordinary artists to the final thirty.  What we have arrived at is a panoply of abstraction and representation, painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture, textile, encaustic, metalwork, wood, dyes, porcelain, diverse expressions of rectilinearity and curvilinearity, muscularity and delicacy, adamance and enigma.  It points toward a vital reimagining of what a mark can convey when deployed in the minds and hands of inspired makers.  I’m heartened and so invigorated by the lineup in this exhibition, and I hope you are, too."

 —Richard Speer