Southwest Contemporary — Vol. 6 — Rooted: Poetics of Place

Southwest Contemporary invites artists throughout the Southwest to submit work to be included in Southwest Contemporary’s Fall-Winter 2022 issue, which will explore the theme “Rooted: Poetics of Place.”

Guest juror: Louise Martorano, executive director of RedLine Contemporary Art Center, Denver.

Published: September 2022.

Submission Fee: $15.

Deadline: June 6, 2022, 11:59 pm MT.

About Vol. 6: Rooted: Poetics of Place.

The Southwest occupies both mythic space and lived experience. Our sense of this place resides somewhere in between, created in the intersections of identity, perspective, and land. This issue of Southwest Contemporary takes a sustained look at place: evoking, elucidating, and complicating this region.

In many ways, the Southwest has been codified, commercialized, and consumed as a distinct place. Replicated, simulated, and imitated, the Southwest as an idea has become a simulacrum of itself. But the resistance to that mythology reveals the real—the meat of the place.

Lucy Lippard wrote that place is “the geographical component of the psychological need to belong somewhere, one antidote to a prevailing alienation.” From the high plains to the deep desert, borderlands, and cities, through mountains, canyons, and arroyos, this land roots deep in the psyche.

Emerging from the isolation, political fracture, and digital placelessness of the pandemic, now is the time to rediscover the hyperlocal—the people and places that are right around us. How does one belong in place? How does place inscribe itself in one’s consciousness? How are identities, histories, and geographies bound to place? Artists are encouraged to think broadly about these ideas.

Eligibility

Artists and collectives residing and working in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Northern Mexico, Texas, and Utah.

We invite all artists (18+) in the Southwest to apply whose work in any medium responds to/engages with/is rooted in concepts of place.