Call for Artists: Southwest Contemporary Vol. 9 — Living Histories

Southwest Contemporary invites artists throughout the Southwest to submit work to be included in Southwest Contemporary’s Spring-Summer 2024 issue, which will explore the theme “Living Histories.”

Some histories are cast in bronze, frozen in time, and memorialized for posterity. Some are transmitted through spoken stories, living on in the memories of those who hear them.

This issue of Southwest Contemporary will delve into the past to reveal the workings of the present. What underground vaults, under-told stories, and obscured narratives can we bring to light? Who are the record keepers, the archivists, the knowledge holders? How have histories been kept and cherished, or suppressed and erased? What do we commemorate, what do we forget?

We want to reassess what we know and what we’ve heard, to seek perspectives on figures that are vaunted and those that have been toppled. We want to hear from artists with long and storied careers, and from witnesses of art scenes that have come and gone. We want to hear from docents of obscure histories and archives. We want to hear about places and objects that hold keys to the past, that we might better understand our place in the present and where we will go in the future.

We invite all artists (18+) across the Southwest to apply whose work relates history to our present moment. The theme can apply to artists working with archives, oral histories, narrative traditions, storytelling, myths and legends, generational timelines and lineages, art history, artifacts or historical objects, site-specific histories, and geologic time, to name a few. This call is open to artists working in all media: 2D, 3D, time-based, digital, etc.

Artists are encouraged to think broadly about these ideas.

Guest Juror:

Kalyn Fay Barnoski, Assistant Curator for Native Art, Philbrook Museum of Art

Kalyn Fay Barnoski (Cherokee Nation enrollee, Muscogee Creek descent) is assistant curator for Native art at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as well as a visual artist and musician. Barnoski approaches curation as a tool for stewarding culture and sharing stories about Native Art and perspectives. Since returning to their hometown of Tulsa in 2021 as Mellon Fellow for Native Art, Barnoski has developed several initiatives, including the major trans-historical exhibition Trade & Transformation and Terrain Tones, a series of site-specific Philbrook garden soundscape experiences created by area musicians. Barnoski has previously worked with Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Art Bridges, and the Momentary in Bentonville, Arkansas, and served as a Mellon Native American Fellow at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Barnoski holds an MFA from the University of Arkansas, an MA from the University of Tulsa, and a BFA from Rogers State University.