Exhibition Theme:

The 2024 Arts Annual is open to New Jersey artists working in any medium (visual, audio, video) who wish to explore the themes of family, community, and belonging, in relation to diversity and inclusion. Artists will be encouraged to offer local to global perspectives. Three galleries at the Montclair Art Museum will be dedicated to the exhibition. This will provide more dedicated space to exhibit many New Jersey Artists. The Montclair Art Museum welcomes submissions from March 4 to April 29, 2024.

The exhibition complements a concurrent exhibition of historic, modern, and contemporary artworks from MAM’s collection, Family, Community, Belonging: Works from the Collection. Conceptually and stylistically diverse, both exhibitions will prompt a variety of questions. How do we define who are our families in an increasingly polarized society? Do we choose our communities or do they choose us? How do we understand different ways of experiencing and navigating the world around us? How can various individuals and families—under dramatically changing conditions and disruptions—knit themselves together to form and maintain a more just and equitable society? Through representation and imagination, artists supply a variety of vividly expressed clues as to possible answers. The Montclair Art Museum is committed to being a place where everyone feels welcome, respected, seen, and heard. For further information, please visit MAM’s website:

https://www.montclairartmuseum.org/press/press-room/montclair-art-museums-commitment-deai-principles 

This open call invites a range of artistic practices and media that explore the family/community theme. In addition to the exhibition, dedicated programs (TBD) will be offered in conjunction with the exhibition, such as tours, related workshops, a panel discussion, etc.

Jurors:

Todd Caissie

Todd Caissie is an enrolled member of the Osage Nation and lives in Freehold, NJ. He is currently the Director of the New Brunswick Internment Camp Museum (Canada), and former member of the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers Board of Advisors. Todd received a PhD in Art History and Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies (CHAPS), and an M.A. in Art History from Rutgers University. He earned a B.A. in Classical Archaeology from Hunter College and B.A. in Psychology from Stony Brook University. His recent curatorial credits include the exhibition ESCAPE: Art from the New Brunswick Internment Camp at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery (Fredericton, Canada); collaborator for the forthcoming Native American art reinstallation at Montclair Art Museum; organizing a display tentatively titled The Creator’s Game: Tewaaraton., and The Artists of Black Mountain: Woven and Intertwined, Josef Albers, Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa at the Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University. Dr. Caissie has taught a variety of Art History courses at Rutgers University and Middlesex County Community College, is a Commissioner on the Freehold Township Historic Preservation Commission, and a grant evaluator for several non-profits including the NJ Council for the Humanities. 

Kimberly Callas

Kimberly Callas is a multi-media artist, sculptor, and the lead artist of the Social Practice project Discovering the Ecological Self. Her work has been exhibited internationally in galleries and museums and has received national and international grants and awards. Recent awards include a Pollination Project Grant, and a Puffin Foundation Grant. In 2020, she received 1st Place Award in Sculpture at the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club’s Annual Exhibit in New York City. Recent exhibits include the International New Media Exhibit at the CICA Museum in South Korea, Summer Exhibition at Flowers Gallery in New York City, and Crossing Boundaries: Art and the Future of Energy at The Pensacola Museum of Art, Florida, In 2019, Callas was selected to attend JOYA: Arte + Ecología Residency, in Vélez-Blanco, Spain. Passaic County commissioned Callas to complete a Life-Size Portrait with an elaborate 6’ Cartouche Relief for the Lambert Castle Renovation in Paterson, NJ, opening May 2024. Her work has been published in Post Human, New Media Art 2020 by CICA Press and has appeared in the Huffington Post and Art New England. Callas offers DEcoSelf workshops internationally, with recent workshops held at the Museum of Art and Design in New York City. In March 2024, she will be an artist-in-residence at the Arts Quarter Budapest, in Hungary. Callas received her MFA from the New York Academy of Art and her BFA from Stamps School of Art at the University of Michigan. She is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Monmouth University, in West Long Branch, NJ and maintains a studio in both Maine and New Jersey. For more information, please see https://kimberlycallas.com/.

Philemona Williamson

Philemona Williamson’s narrative paintings explore the tenuous bridge between adolescence and adulthood, encapsulating the intersection of innocence and experience at its most piercing and poignant moment. She has shown widely, with solo shows at June Kelly Gallery in New York, Jenkins-Johnson Gallery in San Francisco, a mid-career retrospective at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey in 2017, and a recent solo show at Galerie Semiose in Paris. She is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies including The Joan Mitchell Foundation, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, National Endowment for The Arts, New York Foundation for The Arts, and The Millay Colony. In 2022, she received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and was awarded the Anonymous Was A Woman grant. She is represented in numerous private and public collections, including The Montclair Art Museum, The Kalamazoo Art Institute, The Mint Museum of Art, Smith College Museum of Art, Hampton University Museum, Sheldon Art Museum, Mott-Warsh Art Collection, The AT&T Corporate Art Collection, and The Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection. Her public works include fused-glass murals created for the MTA Arts in Transit Program at the Livonia Avenue Subway Station in Brooklyn, a painting used by the MTA’s Poetry In Motion and, for the NYC School Authority, a mosaic mural in Queens. She created a series of paintings for the children’s book “Lubaya’s Quiet Roar” from Penguin Random House. Ms. Williamson has taught Painting & Drawing at Hunter College, Pratt Institute, SVA, Bard College, RISD, Cooper Union, and Parsons as well as serving on the advisory board of the Getty Center for Education and is currently on the board of directors of The Visual Arts Center of New Jersey.

About the Montclair Art Museum: 

The Montclair Art Museum, a notable, community-based institution with an international reputation, features renowned collections of American and Native American art that uniquely highlight art making in the United States over more than three hundred years. Among the first U.S. museums devoted to collecting American art, Montclair Art Museum was founded in 1914 with two parallel collections of Native and non-Native work, each with dedicated gallery space. Our continually evolving collection—today numbering more than 12,000 objects—has been widely recognized for its quality and depth. It features work by a range of artists from across the United States and Native North America dating from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Highlights include landscapes by Montclair-based George Inness, basketry, regalia, beadwork, and more. Works from the permanent collection rotate regularly in our galleries. The Museum’s education programs serve a wide regional public, while invited artists, performers, and scholars share additional talent at Museum special events. MAM’s Yard School of Art is the leading regional art school, offering comprehensive courses for children, teens, adults, seniors, and professional artists. The Montclair Art Museum is located at 3 South Mountain Avenue in Montclair, N.J. Information and directions are available on the Museum website, www.montclairartmuseum.org, or by calling 973-746-5555. MAM is open Fridays and Saturdays, 10 am – 6 pm, and Sundays, 11 am – 5 pm., and closed on Mondays - Thursdays, and major holidays. Museum admission is $15 for nonmember adults, $12 for senior citizens and students with I.D., and free for members and children under 12.

Application Requirements

There is NO entry fee.

To submit their artwork, artists are encouraged to visit the Montclair Art Museum's Exhibition landing page: https://www.montclairartmuseum.org/exhibitions, where they will find a direct link to apply online at www.callforentry.org (CAFÉ). On this dedicated landing page for the exhibition, artists can also access a PDF of the abbreviated prospectus, providing comprehensive information about the submission process. This centralized hub will serve as the focal point for artists, streamlining the submission experience and ensuring easy access to all necessary resources.

Artists may submit up to three (3) total works in any media for consideration. Images, video or audio files may all be submitted, but the total number of submitted works must be no more than three (3). Compilation images are acceptable if more than one image of a piece of work is needed to show details.

See Specifications below for accepted CAFÉ work sample formats.

Submissions must also include:

• A current résumé
• Brief artist biography
• An artist’s statement
• Complete and accurate dimensions (in inches). Height x Width x Depth; weight if over 50lbs; # minutes for audio/video) of the work submitted.

For works selected for the exhibition, artists must be prepared to submit high resolution images to be used in the catalogue, on the Museum website and publications, programs, and/or for press purposes. 

If you do not choose to have your images retained by the Museum, please note that at the top of your artists’ statement document. 

The Museum reserves the right to edit the artist’s statement with the artist’s approval. The artist statement should be written in the first person and no more than 150 words. The bio should not be more than 500 words. 

Specifications:

All work samples must be submitted via a CAFÉ application.

• Images must be in JPEG or JPG format.
  • File Dimensions: 1,200 pixels or greater on the longest side.
  • File Size: Under 5 MB
• Video must be in MOV, MP4, WMV, 3GP, AVI, ASF, MPG, M2T, MKV, or M2TS format.
  • File Size: Under 100 MB.
• Linked media from YouTube, Vimeo, etc. is not accepted.
• Audio must be in AIFF, WAV, XMF, or MP3 format.
  • File Size: Under 10 MB.
• Selected artists will be asked to provide images of publishable quality. The selected artists will grant permission to use these images in the exhibition catalogue, on the Museum website, in digital publications, or for press purposes related to the 2024 New Jersey Arts Annual.
• Inclusion of images in the application constitutes permission from the artist to use submitted images for such purposes free of restrictions. The Museum will endeavor to include all appropriate credit information whenever images are reproduced.
• Each digital file MUST include the following as accompanying information in the CAFÉ upload: artist’s name, title of work, date, medium and dimensions (in inches, height x width [x depth, if appropriate]; weight if over 50lbs; # minutes for video/audio). (Example: “Jane Smith, Untitled, 2021, oil on canvas, 24 x 24")
• CAFE accepts up to three (3) total uploads of all work.  Compilation images are acceptable if more than one image is of a piece of work is needed to show details.
• Invited artists are responsible for the delivery and pickup of their artworks. Artwork MUST be ready to install and include all necessary hanging hardware (D rings, metal wire, cleats), equipment or mounts. If artwork is not inherently balanced or stable, an appropriate mount or method must be provided.
• Electrical requirements must be stated; US/North America standard: 115/120V, 60hz; no more than 15 amp. Delicate electronics (micro-controllers, midis, etc.) must include their own battery back-up (UPS).
• Audio, video and media works must be accompanied by all the necessary AV equipment (monitor, projector, media player, speakers, cables, etc.). They must have the ability to automatically restart components and initialize the multimedia program if power is interrupted. Multimedia must function without active WiFi and all auto update features should be disabled. Sound volume must be adjustable.

Submission Checklist:

Please upload all written items on this submission checklist to one document that is no more than 3 pages (Artist Bio, Statement, and Résumé).

• Completed Entry Form in CaFE
• Up to 3 images per applicant or 3 videos for new media submissions, or a combination of images, video, and audio of no more than 3 samples. All work samples should be of the highest quality possible that CAFÉ will allow.
• Artist Biography, 500 words maximum
• Artist Statement document, 150 words maximum, written in the first person
• Current Résumé

Please Do Not Email Images directly to the Museum.

Email Alexandra Lebovitz, Curatorial Assistant, with any relevant queries. alebovitz@montclairartmuseum.org

Schedule:

Application Deadline                April 29, 2024        

Jury Deliberation                      May 1-20, 2024      

Artists Notified of Status         May 21, 2024

Delivery of Artworks Date        August 5 – 9, 2024 (exact dates to be confirmed)

Soft Opening                            September 12, 2024

Opening Reception                  September 26, 2024

Exhibition Closes                    January 5, 2025                

Pick-up Dates                          January 6-10, 2025 (exact dates to be confirmed)   

Eligibility Criteria

Artists aged 18 or older at the time of application who work or live in the state of New Jersey are eligible to apply.

The exhibition theme and galleries can accommodate works created in traditional and contemporary art and craft media – oil acrylic, tempera, stone, digital, video, film, metal, glass, wood, textiles, clay, etc., and methods – painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, printmaking, film/new media, audio, installation, metalwork, glassblowing, woodworking, textile, ceramic, etc.

Works may be designed for wall hanging (2-D or 3-D); free-standing sculptures intended for the floor or pedestal display; small or medium works for protected display cases; for audio installation; or for video display on a screen or digital monitor. All works must be ready to install, including all necessary hanging hardware (D-rings, metal wire, cleats/Z hangers), mounts, or audio/visual equipment.

All submissions must represent work that:

• Has been completed within the past two years.
• Is available for the complete duration of the exhibition.

Any sales inquiries will be directed to each artist.