Felicity Hammond, Property (2017), installation view. Included in Rendered Cities, an apexart Open Call exhibition organized by ANGL Collective in NYC.
apexart has been making people think for more than 24 years. Their curatorial and exhibition opportunities remove the insider status that is often associated with exhibition-making by opening up the process to involve anyone with a good idea and the ability to express it. apexart holds two Open Calls each year, which result in seven exhibitions selected from over 1,200 anonymous proposals by two international juries of more than more than 600 people. Professional connections and experience don’t matter, only the quality of the proposal does. When an exhibition is selected for apexart’s program season, it means that its ideas are compelling, worth developing, and often contain incredibly prescient content. More than 32,000 votes are logged each year by the jurors who want to see an idea transform from a proposal into an exhibition.
The result of this process is a roster of exhibitions that are politically, personally, and socially driven, thematically diverse, and relevant to audiences. In 2018, Rendered Cities considered the impact of digital architectural renderings on urban landscapes and the human psyche, Light in Wartime explored the use of light–both metaphorically and technically–in the context of photography during times of war, and this Fall, Tracing Obsolescence will investigate the material and psychic traces left by declining industrial-scale manufacturing and extraction. apexart also held exhibitions around the world in places such as Bali, Indonesia, where apexart’s exhibition Dipping in the Kool Aid showcased the creative collaborations between artists and prisoners in Indonesian jails; in Athens, Greece, where artists created site-specific works in Athens’ former Olympic Village for Slower, Smaller, Weaker; and in Nagoya, Japan, where Absences sought to break toxic taboos around mental health issues.
apexart awards a budget of $10,000 towards the production of each selected exhibition and its related programming, which includes a $2,000 curatorial honorarium for coordinating the project and writing the exhibition essay.
Proposals for group exhibitions in apexart’s NYC exhibition space will be accepted from October 1-31, 2018.
To learn more about how to submit your 500-word exhibition proposal, visit apexart.org/opencalls
