The Dairy Arts Center and East Window are excited to announce a juried exhibition opening March 2023 on the streets of Boulder, CO. 50 images will be selected from submissions and printed as 3’ x 5’ single sided fabric flags that will be placed at partner locations between The Dairy and East Window’s gallery space, primarily located along Broadway. 

Submitted by artists and non-artists alike, the works in this exhibit span a range of disciplines and affective registers. JOYSOME celebrates our divergent experiences of joy while reflecting on the subjective worlds of this emotion, upon its unique timings and subsets, and upon joy's crucial functions in human existence.

Details 

All visual art mediums are acceptable for entry. Selected entries will be reproduced into a ~3’ x 5’ single sided flag to be displayed at partner locations between The Dairy Arts Center and east window along Broadway in Boulder, CO. If selected, artists will need to submit a high resolution file of selected images. Images may be submitted in either vertical or horizontal format.

Artists are able to submit up to 10 images for this call. 

Please note, selected applications are not guaranteed placement in their preferred partner location. Placement of images will be determined at the discretion of the exhibition curators. 

 Application Fees: $15 for first submission, $1 for each additional image (up to 10 total), non refundable

Guest Jurors:

Charlo

Charlo is a multimedia artist and designer who strives for one thing: joy. Using symbols, letters and lines, his monochromatic two-dimensional works are a space for exploration and discovery. Hidden themes and messages reside in the densely packed compositions, allowing viewers to impart their own sense of meaning from the works, or be delighted by the meanings provided by the artist. The interwoven shapes, words and symbols foster a sense of community interaction, collaboration, and hopeful optimism. Having emigrated from Monterrey, Mexico in 2013, the Denver-based artist describes himself as filled to the brim with gratitude. In his native language of Spanish, the equivalent for “experiencing joy” is “alegría” and it is this experience of joy he wishes to share with the world through his works. The deceptively simple yet dense paintings and drawings are reminiscent of influential artists such as MC Escher, Keith Haring and Remedios Varo. His communal collaborations between spectator and artist began in Denver with his Make Alleys Great Again project, in which the artist appropriated the slogan of a politically divisive U.S. politician to instead bring unity and joy to communities. Using the NextDoor app, the artist connected with fellow residents of the greater Denver community who invited him to paint murals onto their garage doors. All told, the artist brought local art to more than five dozen alleyways. Since his Make Alleys Great Again project, the artist has continued to make a name for himself. In 2021, he produced a live mural entitled The Joy of Being Together in partnership with NextDoor and the New York Stock Exchange. The artist's joyful, optimistic, and community-oriented work continues to gain interest on a national level.

art.charlo.design

Harry James Hanson

Harry James Hanson is an artist and creative director based in Brooklyn. Harry’s new photography book, Legends of Drag: Queens of a Certain Age (Abrams, 2022) is an archive of living drag history, in collaboration with Devin Antheus. Legends of Drag was the focus of a 2022 exhibition at the Museum of Wisconsin Art (Milwaukee, WI), and a second show at the Tenderloin Museum (San Francisco, CA) is planned for 2023. Harry‘s work has appeared in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Vice, New York magazine, and The Guardian, among others. As a drag artist, Harry has performed internationally with the Bushwig festival and queer venues throughout New York City. Harry holds a dual degree with honors in Film Studies and Photography from Wesleyan University (2012).

harryjameshanson.com

Important Dates 

Ÿ Deadline for Application: December 9th, 2022

Ÿ Juror selection of art: Dec 10 - 29th, 2022

Ÿ Artist notification: December 30th, 2022

Ÿ Exhibition dates: March 1st - 31st, 2023

Full Curatorial Statement by Todd Edward Herman / Founding Director of East Window:

Joy is frequently understood as the fulfillment of desires which are considered essential to one’s own flourishing. Joy involves an existential and personally salient experience that is significant enough to produce a powerful emotional response. Joy serves critical evolutionary functions such as its role in forming bonds between infants and parents, and in intimate romantic relationships. The experience of joy is a fundamental response to human possibility. 

Why then, do we so readily dismiss joy as the “emotion of luxury”? And why do our respective experiences of joy often feel inappropriate in a world that both suffers without it and needs it so significantly? 

Perhaps joy's credibility has been eroded in Western cultures, particularly in America, because we've been inundated by myths that joy is an ultimate destination arrived at by following a few simple programs (cooking, signing, working, not working, motherhood, or sex -- referencing just some of the popular book titles of the past few decades). "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" continue to be the most important value-directed goals by which many guide their lives. Not achieving these goals or failing to appear even inauthentically happy much of the time can give cause for concern. With pressures to maximize happiness and minimize sadness we fear that our attainment of happiness and potentially joy is continually out of reach. This creates a culture addicted to happiness and its pursuit, wherein only the privileged have unlimited access to it. 

JOYSOME looks beyond superficial prescriptions for the perfect life and welcomes all of our divergent experiences and interpretations of what joy is to us. JOYSOME reflects upon the subjective worlds of this emotion, upon its unique timings and subsets, and upon joy's crucial functions in human existence. 

JOYSOME consists of fifty images selected from hundreds of responses to a call for work on the theme of joy. Submitted by artists and non-artists alike, the works in this exhibit span a range of disciplines and affective registers associated with joy— Ecstasy, Transcendence, Sadness, The Fear of Joy, Anger, Mania, Euphoria, Toxic Positivity, The American Dream, The Pursuit of Happiness, Masochism, Selflessness, Success, Sacrifice, Divination, Cuteness, The Sublime, Altruism, and Peace. The selected images are printed on flags and exhibited throughout the Front Range as part of the Month of Photography Festival - March 2023.

About the Dairy Arts Center 

Dairy Arts Center was founded in 1992 to provide cooperative workspaces for local artists and venues for live performance in Boulder County. Originally owned by the Watts-Hardy Dairy, the building’s transformation from a former milk-processing facility to a thriving multi-disciplinary arts hub for Boulder and beyond is a nationally recognized example of constructive urban development and renewal. The Dairy’s founders envisioned a community arts center where artists of all genres would create and inspire each other and the greater community. 

Today, this dream of shared art making is a thriving reality. The Dairy’s 42,000 square foot facility houses disciplines ranging from visual arts, theater, and film to dance and music. A professional environment complete with art galleries, performance venues, teaching studios, offices, rehearsal spaces, dance studios, and a 60-seat art-house cinema, it is Boulder’s largest multi-disciplinary arts center. The Dairy’s audience spans all ages, backgrounds and ability levels, from young student to seasoned performer and from first-time to seasoned theatergoers. Our audience is inclusive of all ages and backgrounds as well as adults and children of various cultures and levels of ability; our facility is accessible to persons with physical mobility challenges.

About East Window:

East Window supports and promotes diverse artistic practices and the ideas that surround them. 

East Window opened its doors (its window actually) in May 2020, and is designed for the presentation and outdoor viewing of programmed as well as guest-curated screenings, exhibits and installations. We also develop and host several collaborative projects each year, featuring artists whose work responds to intimate and personal as well as compelling social and political issues of our time. 

We hope that the works to be shown here will attest to contemporary art’s ongoing relevance within social discourse and its capacity to create a more socially just, equitable, accessible and inclusive world.

East Window is located on ancestral lands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute tribes. Consciously or unconsciously we all currently benefit from the historic and ongoing injustices committed against these and other Native peoples of this land. Therefore, we would like to acknowledge these tribes, the many other tribes who have traveled through the area, as well as any federally unrecognized tribes who first stewarded this territory.
 

Contact:  For additional information, contact Curator of Visual Arts, Drew Austin, drew@thedairy.org

Application Requirements

All submitted images must be able to be reproduced

If selected, artist MUST be able to send a high resolution file of the selected image for reproduction

Please also include:

• Brief artist biography
• Contact information
• Artist Statement pertaining to work submitted (optional)

Eligibility Criteria

All mediums will be accepted

Artists over 18 years of age are eligible to apply (younger artists may apply with parental permission, please reach out to drew@thedairy.org for more details)

Incomplete applications will not be considered

Applications received after the due date will not be considered 

If the required application fee is a financial barrier for your application being submitted, please reach out for assistance to drew@thedairy.org