Woman Made Gallery, Chicago, IL - Calls for ART with April 26th deadlines!

Today I received an email from one of my favorite nonprofit galleries, Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, Illinois. I have grown to love it under the leadership of Beate Minkowski, the former Executive Director, and have always listed their Calls to Artists on the artist promotion website I created, the Southern Oregon Artists Resource ( www.soartists.com ) Beate just retired and a new Executive Director has taken over, so it is a little bit sad but also very exciting that we can see and participate in the work of this important organization as it grows forward under fresh leadership.

Since I've gotten a bit more active on World Pulse in recent weeks I've made some friends here and thought it would be good to post these artist calls in case someone knows a woman artist who might like to participate in one of their upcoming shows. Full disclosure: I am not connected with Woman Made Gallery in any financial or business way. I am just an admirer of the opportunity they present to woman artists around the world and hope it will help you to know about them.

Exhibitions at Woman Made Gallery are open to women from around the world, unless otherwise noted. Entries may be mailed with jpgs on a CD or submit your entry with digital files (jpgs) online. Entry Fee: $30 for images of up to 3 works.

Online Entries: Submit jpgs of up to three of your works on our website: http://www.womanmade.org/entryform.html

Mailed Entries: Mail a cd with jpg images of up to three of your works, completed entry form, and a $30 entry fee to Woman Made Gallery, 685 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago, IL 60642.

Here are the exhibitions for which they are now accepting entries. I think the "Contained" Exhibition (the second one) shows promise for many of us to exhibit meaningful work on the varied topics of women's issues:

CALL FOR ARTWORK: texttexttext (pdf)
Exhibition Dates: July 11 – August 21, 2014

Text is communication: “I’ll text you”.
Text is image: TeXt. tExT.
Text is nowhere to be seen: .......

From art reduced to nothing but text, to art depicting obscured or unseen text; from Tracy Emin’s neons to Adrian Piper’s calling cards: text is limitless in its manifestations as a figurative, conceptual, and activist element within contemporary art. texttexttext seeks to explore text-based work in all media, and invites artists of all genders to submit.

Juror: Monika Szewczyk
Monika Szewczyk divides her time between writing, editing, curating and teaching. She has contributed essays to numerous catalogues as well as journals such as Afterall, A Prior, C Magazine, Camera Austria, Canadian Art, F.R. David, Mousse, and e-flux journal. From 2008 to 2012, she was head of publications at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, where she also taught in the Fine Arts Masters Course at the Piet Zwart Institute. Monica Szewczyk was on the curatorial team of the Vancouver Art Gallery and coordinated programming at the Belkin Satellite, a space of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia. She is Visual Arts Program Curator at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago: http://arts.uchicago.edu/content/logan-center-arts-announces-monika-szew...

Entry Deadline: April 26, 2014
Notifications: May 14, 2014

CALL FOR ARTWORK: Contained (pdf)
Exhibition Dates: July 11 – August 21, 2014

The world is composed of structures and forces intended to contain life around us. A dam is built to obstruct a body of water. A sling holds a baby close to her mother. A cage confines an animal. A vessel stores necessities like food and water. A man attends anger-management to control his temper, and a prisoner is forced to live in a cell; incarcerated. Whether for the effect of safety or punishment; livelihood or capital gain, the objective of keeping something contained is to restrict and limit its freedom of movement. This show invites artists to interpret the idea of containment in its literal, physical, and transient forms. From sculpture to photography, Woman Made Gallery solicits work in all media that explores the organic and man-made limits, borders, and boundaries of place, space, and time.

Juror: Carolina Caycedo
Carolina Caycedo is a Los Angeles-based artist of Colombian and British background. She engages with issues and contexts that affect a broad public on an everyday level. In her work, art functions as a pretext for offering up utopian models to inhabit a world in which individuals and communities are increasingly subject to commodification, exploitation, and discrimination. She has developed publicly engaged projects in Bogotá, Madrid, San Juan, New York, San Francisco, and London amongst other places.
Carolina Caycedo’s work has been exhibited worldwide with solo shows at Vienna Secession, Intermediae-Matadero Madrid, Alianza Francesa Bogotá, Hordaland Kunstsenter Bergen, and DAAD Gallery in Berlin. She participated in the 2013 Paris Triennial, 2009 Havana Biennial, 2009 San Juan Poligraphic Triennial, 2006 Whitney Biennial, 2003 Venice Biennial, and 2001 Istanbul Biennial. In 2012 Caycedo was a DAAD's Artist-in-Berlin resident.

Entry Deadline: April 26, 2014
Notifications: May 14, 2014

CALL FOR ARTWORK: Oil and Water (pdf)
Exhibition Dates: Nov. 14 – Dec. 21, 2014

Invitation to all artists to submit original work in all painting media: oil, acrylic, water color, gouache, encaustic, with the addition of m/m if desired, on canvas, wood, paper or any other 2D or 3D surface.

“I look to choose artworks that exhibit, in some manner, the courage to “let go of certainties” (Eric Fromm). The questions I ask are: Does it need to be made? Is there an element of originality? Is there a spark of necessity?” –Sarah Krepp, Curator, Artist, Professor

Juror: Sarah Krepp
With an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Sarah Krepp has been a noted Chicago artist for more than 25 years. She has shown nationally and internationally, and her work is included in many corporate and private collections. Locally she is represented by Roy Boyd Gallery in Chicago.
In 2003 Sarah Krepp became founding and on-going director of DIALOGUE CHICAGO, an interdisciplinary critique/seminar that includes artists from painting to installation, performance, and time arts. She is the curator for Gallery 175, Chicago.

Sarah Krepp is Professor Emeritus of Art and former Chair of the Painting Program in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has over 20 years of teaching experience at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Southern Illinois University, the Burren College of Art (Ballyvaughn, Ireland), as well as the University of Illinois.
For more information visit www.sarahkrepp.com.

Entry Deadline: August 14, 2014
Notifications: September 10, 2014

You can find the rest of the information you need to enter one of these shows on this page: http://www.womanmade.org/entryform.html

Please, sister artists of the World Pulse Community! Think about entering your art at Woman Made Gallery so it can be seen in Chicago! I know there will be some who can't afford the $30 entry fee, but I thought that if I posted this and anyone who's interested in showing with them left a comment, then maybe there will be someone willing to help an artist who wants to participate but doesn't have the money. I also think it would be lovely if the artists of World Pulse posted their art work here to share with everyone. I am so excited to learn about the art that women are doing around the world, both activist art for women's issues and fine art of any medium or subject. If you decide to enter, please let use know in the comments! If you do, I hope it will open another door of opportunity for you too.

I will share some of my own artwork soon, though I don't have anything on women's issues. Yet. I just finished one painting that has a nice story behind it and was made to be a gift for the young woman who brought me buckets full of oil paints, a medium I hadn't experimented with before. I did one study - a miniature of Picasso's Guernica - before the "gift" painting. Reducing it down from the original huge 26 foot long canvas size to fit my little 20 inch canvas was the first challenge! And reproducing abstract, cubist art is not a straightforward as it appears! it was fun and I learned a lot from painting my first oils, and my first piece after a master. I learned about Picasso while doing this too. An incredibly passionate man, this was his first and only piece of activist art, created to protest the unprovoked and tragic bombing of civilian Basques in Guernica, Spain out of the clear blue sky on a market day. I think the way he approached the subject says a lot about the artist and his compassion toward women and their losses during wars and unprovoked attacks like this one. Picasso was in Spain at the time, working as the Director of the National Museum. It received a cool reception at the Paris Exposition where it was first exhibited, yet when Picasso returned to Paris, he was welcomed by huge crowds of admirers. Now people stand in awe of this powerful, agonizing and compassionate painting. You can click the little thumbnail at the top of the post to see my little copy of it larger.

I do have two blank canvases looking at me right now! I'm not sure what to paint, so I'm letting them speak to me about what they want to become. I will share when I get them started.