Call for Art Submissions for “Pandemics as a Portal to Change”

The Krannert Art Museum, the Museum of the Grand Prairie, The Urbana Free Library, Urbana Arts and Culture Program, the College of Fine and Applied Arts at Illinois, and Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center, among other organizations, are calling for art that reflects on the COVID-19 pandemic.

Artists are invited to submit visual art, creative writing, original music, or video/performance that reimagines the world as we know it and visualizes the other worlds we know are possible, in an exhibit entitled: “Pandemics as a Portal to Change.”

The challenge for artists is to look at current struggles in society: COVID-19 (sickness, grief, loss, isolation, fear for loved ones, etc.), systemic racism, economic crisis, climate change and political polarization and imagine a way forward.

The Call for Submission website quotes Arundhati Roy, the author of “The God of Small Things”:

“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging our prejudice and hatred…our dead rivers and smoky skies…or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”   

The April 19 submission deadline is ahead of a May 3 video compilation to be aired on Urbana Public Television and archived by the Museum of the Grand Prairie for potential use as future historical documentation of this time.

To learn more about submissions visit: https://kam.illinois.edu/news/call-art-pandemics-portal-change-community-exhibition?fbclid=IwAR28-L1scv1iPciIkyIqJpF6du80OwAL5UkplkdvdzSECKaX-kQM1iCeFFQ.