Deadline: 17-Jan-22
The Soo Visual Arts Center is seeking applications for its Change is God-Take Root Among the Stars: Black Abstraction in the Midwest.
Soo Visual Arts Center is a nonprofit art space that connects their community with fresh, under-represented and provocative art.
"Take Root Among the Stars: Black Abstraction in the Midwest" is an exhibition that will illuminate new approaches and strategies for Black Abstractionists to respond to this historical time with the freedom to imagine beyond this earth and beyond the art historical canon.
The exhibition title is in reference to the Black Science Fiction Writer, Octavia Butler's two volume collection The Earthseed Books; a story that depicts a society in the aftermath of worldwide ecological and economic apocalypse. The protagonist in this new world is guided by what is called "The Book of the Living." In passage 44 of "The Book of the Living" there is a title to a passage that reads, "the words of welcoming". In that same spirit, this exhibition is a welcoming to those artists that live and work in the Midwest that use Abstraction as their framework to speak to this new time.
This exhibition seeks to discover what shifts are occurring within the canon of abstraction through the lens of the Black experience as a whole. This exhibition welcomes a new abstraction that moves indiscriminately through different media and reaches beyond the formal abstractions of what they know and enters into the space of what they might not yet know, using the unfamiliar, the quotidian, the expected or unexpected to do this. They are searching for art that speaks to this new moment that is upon that that will distinctly mark this period in time.
Eligibility Criteria
Applicants must be working in the Midwest. The Midwest is defined as the following states: IL, IN, IA, KS, MI, MN, MO, NE, ND, OH, SD, and WI.
For more information, visit Soo Visual Arts Center.
For more information, visit https://www.soovac.org/call-for-submissions-2022-2023
