ARTINA 2025: Upside Down - Inside Out

Call for Entries

Artina 2025: Upside Down - Inside Out, Presented by the Washington Sculptors Group and Sandy Spring Museum

JUROR: Zoma Wallace

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: Sunday, July 27, 2025 (received by 11:59pm EST, received through the submission site EntryThingy)

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

The realities of today’s world seem to have turned topsy-turvy. What was up is now down, ‘left’ is pitted against ‘right’, and confidence proportionally falls as uncertainty climbs higher with the hour. Meanwhile, self-proclaimed outsiders have resolutely taken ownership of the inside track. In reflection, we ask ourselves collectively, “What now? What next? Where are we? Where do we go from here? How do we reorient ourselves within a world turned upside down and inside out?” We ask these questions in an attempt to locate ourselves within a morphing paradigm and to ground ourselves despite ever-changing circumstances.

Quite possibly, creative responses to these questions are best communicated in sculptural form. Through sculpture, installation, sound, performance, and interdisciplinary expression, Upside Down, Inside Out invites artists to explore inversions and reorientations. 

Inversion and orientation can each be interpreted geographically or directionally, psychologically or sexually, politically, positionally, or materially. This exhibition thematically embraces the carnivalesque: inclusive of mischief, playfulness, whimsy, chaos, and excess. Approaches and interpretations of related topics may range widely, from the unfamiliar and the uncanny, to the surreal and the satirical, the absurd and the abject, the ironic and the burlesque, the silly and the serious. As such, Upside Down, Inside Out is a space of radical hospitality, welcoming and inviting all modes of imaginative subversion and unfettered inquiry that challenge the dominion of absolute power, unquestioned patrimony, and obligatory acceptance of the status quo.

- Zoma Wallace, May 2025

ABOUT THE ARTINA EXHIBITION SERIES

The ARTINA exhibition series, now in its 9th year, is an ongoing partnership between Washington Sculptors Group and the Sandy Spring Museum that invites social engagement with the environment through participation and collaboration. Artists are encouraged to envision interactions in the natural landscape, engaging visually and physically with nature.

Past exhibitions include: A Point of View, juried by Nehemiah Dixon III (2024); Queering Nature, juried by Stephanie Mercedes (2023); A Space in Place, juried by Natalie Fulgencio-Turner (2022); Balancing Acts, juried by Twylene Moyer (2021); Light, A Sculptural Solar Dance, juried by María Gabriela Mizes (2020); Introspective, juried by Cecilia Wichmann (2018); (Re)Use and Abuse of the Land, juried by Ursula Achternkamp (2017); and Art in Nature, juried by Martine Van Kampen (2016).

HONORARIUM: Accepted Artists will receive an honorarium of $150.

Zoma Wallace, Juror

Zoma Wallace is an artist and independent curator raising a family in her hometown of Washington, D.C. For the past 20 years, Zoma has charted a unique path as a creative, earning respect and recognition for her aesthetic instincts, adventurous ideas, and thoughtful critical insights. Many in the D.C. arts community know her from a decade of public service as the curator for the DC Commission of the Arts & Humanities, where she changed the municipal art landscape; expanding the agency’s art collection with diverse contemporary acquisitions, instituting a gallery exhibition program, and creating a new grant to fund emerging D.C. curators in realizing compelling exhibition concepts. Zoma holds a BA from Spelman College, an MFA from Howard University, and is a PhD candidate in Art Theory, Aesthetics, & Philosophy at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA).

17901 Bentley Rd Sandy Spring, MD 20860