2025-07-31 02:53:09
It’s about time for us to refresh our shelves at the Colossal Shop, and we need your help to do it. From now until Saturday, August 2, take 20% off our collection of books. Simply use code SUMMER20 at checkout to see your total come down. (Please note: pre-order titles and Le Corbuffet: Edible Art and Design Classics are excluded.)
Good news for our Colossal Members: your discount does stack with this sale. Make sure to use both SUMMER20 and your member code at checkout to receive a total of 35% off. And if you’re not a Colossal Member yet, no problem at all. Join today at any tier to enjoy a multitude of perks—and this year’s biggest book sale so far.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Enjoy 20% Off Books in the Colossal Shop appeared first on Colossal.
2025-07-31 00:10:57
Every month, we share opportunities for artists and designers, including open calls, grants, fellowships, and residencies. Make sure you never miss out by joining our monthly Opportunities Newsletter.
Open Calls
Wave Hill Call for 2026 Sunroom Project Space Proposals (New York City)
The Sunroom Project Space offers artists in the early stages of their careers who reside within a 50-mile radius of the Bronx a chance to create and showcase a site-specific, solo project in Wave Hill’s Sunroom or Sun Porch of Glyndor Gallery. Artists will receive a $2,000 honorarium, exhibition and professional development support, and will have six to twelve months to research and develop ideas.
Deadline: August 3, 2025.
Open Call for Sculpture by the Sea, Cottesloe 2026 (International)
Staged since 2005, the Cottesloe coastal exhibition features more than 70 sculptures and is enjoyed by 220,000 visitors, making the show a feature of Perth’s cultural calendar. All types, forms, sizes, and materials are eligible for entry, and submissions are open to established and emerging artists. Awards include the Mostyn Family Foundation Artist Subsidy of $5,000, the Pommery Champagne Artist Award of $5,000, and the Kids’ Choice Prize of $2,000.
Deadline: 11:59 p.m. AWST on August 18, 2025.
Hunt Museum Open Submission Exhibition 2025 (Ireland)
This exhibition offers a unique platform for both emerging and established artists to showcase their work in one of Ireland’s most respected cultural institutions. Visual artists working in paint, photography, sculpture, print, drawing, and mixed media are eligible. The entry fee is €15, plus €15 per additional artwork up to a total of four entries.
Deadline: 12 p.m. IST on August 31, 2025.
New Voices 2026 Open Call (U.S.)
New Voices is Print Center New York’s annual open call program, which provides opportunities for six to eight artists to present their work and develop their practices through an exhibition, public programming, focused conversations, community-building, and individualized resources for artistic and professional development. Chosen artists receive $2,500, travel, and lodging.
Deadline: August 31, 2025.
Moons, Castles, Trees | The Wrong Biennale ’26 | Copenhagen (International)
Artists, painters, photographers, writers, poets, calligraphers, illustrators, sculptors, print-makers, generative artists, graffiti and stencil artists are invited to submit still images, whether a single photograph or a series of up to six, that respond to questions about artificial intelligence. All image-making methods are welcome.
Deadline: September 15, 2025.
The Abbey Harris Mural Fund (U.K.)
This grant supports artists in the creation of semi-permanent or permanent public murals or site-specific works on walls in any medium. Funding of up to £7,000 is available for an artist or organization producing a public mural.
Deadline: October 10, 2025.
Grants
Ellis-Beauregard 2025 Project Grants (Maine)
The Ellis-Beauregard Foundation is offering five $10,000 project grants for Maine artists working in all genres.
Deadline: August 1, 2025.
Seattle Art Museum Betty Bowen Award (Washington, Oregon, and Idaho)
The annual Betty Bowen Award is administered by the Seattle Art Museum and honors a Northwest artist for their original, exceptional, and compelling work. The top award is an unrestricted cash prize of $20,000 and a solo exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum. Additionally, up to two Special Recognition Awards ($4,000 each) and three Special Commendation Awards ($2,500 each) are often granted at the discretion of the Betty Bowen Committee. There is a $10 application fee.
Deadline: August 1, 2025.
Hornsby Art Prize (Australia)
The non-acquisitive Hornsby Art Prize celebrates Australian contemporary art and is open to all Australian residents aged 18 years and over. Categories include painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, and sculpture. There is an overall prize pool valued at AUD$23,000, with first and second prizes of $10,000 and $5,000, respectively. The fee is $40 per entry.
Deadline: 5 p.m. AEST on August 7, 2025.
QEST Emerging Maker Grants (U.K.)
QEST offers three grants to support makers and conservators at various career stages, strengthening the pipeline of talented craft professionals in the U.K. The organization supports contemporary and traditional craft, as well as the exploration of innovative techniques. The three tracks include Emerging Maker Grants, the QEST Scholarship, and the QEST Apprenticeship. Grants range from £3,000 to £12,000 depending on the program.
Deadline: 5 p.m. BST on August 13, 2025.
Liu Shiming Art Foundation’s Artist Grants (International)
Each year, the Liu Shiming Art Foundation selects up to five artists to receive a $5,000 grant. Visual artists working for at least two years (but not more than 10) are invited to apply for support for a current or new project.
Deadline: August 21, 2025.
BigCi Environmental Awards 2025 (International)
Artists from all fields are invited to submit entries for the BigCi Environmental Awards 2025. Two winners will each receive four free weeks at the BigCi residency and AUD$5,000 prize money. The winning artists will have an opportunity to explore the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Wollemi, Blue Mountains, and Gardens of Stone National Parks on guided walks and will be given research assistance relevant to their projects. There is a $40 application fee.
Deadline: August 24, 2025.
1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art (Southern U.S.)
The Gibbes Museum of Art in partnership with 1858 Society is accepting applications for this $10,000 prize. Eligible applicants must reside, work in, or be from one of the following southern states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, or West Virginia. There is a $35 application fee.
Deadline: September 7, 2025.
Vital Impacts Environmental Photography Grant 2025 (International)
Vital Impacts offers one $20,000 grant to an established environmental photographer, along with six $5,000 grants to emerging photographers. These funds are specifically earmarked for the development of documentary projects focusing on environmental stories.
Deadline: September 15, 2025.
Craft Research Fund Grant (U.S.)
The Center for Craft awards grants from $5,000 to $15,000 annually to support new and interdisciplinary research.
Deadline: October 17, 2025.
The Adolf and Esther Gottlieb Emergency Grant (International)
This program provides one-time financial assistance to qualified painters, printmakers, and sculptors whose needs resulted from an unforeseen catastrophic incident and who lack the resources to meet that situation. Awardees typically receive $5,000 and up to $15,000.
Deadline: Rolling.
Adobe Creative Residency Community Fund (Ukraine)
This fund commissions visual artists to create company projects on a rolling basis. Awardees will receive between $500 and $5,000.
Deadline: Rolling.
Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (International)
The foundation welcomes applications from painters, sculptors, and artists working on paper, including printmakers. Grants are intended for one year and range up to $50,000. The artist’s circumstances determine the size of the grant, and professional exhibition history will be considered.
Deadline: Rolling.
Residencies, Fellowships, & More
Zion National Park Artist-in-Residence (International)
The Artist-in-Residence Program at Zion National Park offers professional artists of various media the opportunity to pursue their artistic discipline while being surrounded by the park’s inspiring landscape. Three artists will be selected for three-month residencies in 2026. Each artist receives free housing and a $500 travel reimbursement. There is a $20 application fee.
Deadline: August 1, 2025.
Bemis Center Autumn Residencies (International)
Selected artists-in-residence enjoy generously sized, private live/work studios in Omaha, a $1,250 monthly stipend, and a $750 travel stipend. Due to the limitations of B2 visas (touring/visiting), international artists-in-residence are ineligible for direct stipend payment but are eligible to receive reimbursement up to the total stipend amount of qualified expenses, such as airfare, ground transportation, and meals.
Deadline: August 4, 2025.
Art on the Block NYC 2026 Residency (New York City)
This five-week residency will take place in a NYC storefront (107 West 86th Street). The artist-in-residence will have the opportunity to transform the space into a studio and public viewing space. Artists should facilitate scheduled programming for youth, families, and adults, including art-making workshops, interviews, and more. There is a $6,000 stipend.
Deadline: 6 p.m. EST on August 8, 2025.
Powerhouse Arts Artist-in-Residence Program (New York City)
This Powerhouse Arts residency program supports emerging to mid-career artists working in print, ceramics, public art, and textiles who have been historically underrepresented in traditional residency programs, specifically Black, Indigenous, artists of color, LGBTQIA+, disabled, and low-income artists. Artists receive access to Powerhouse Arts’ facilities and communal studio space, free materials, professional development opportunities, a $10,000 honorarium, and a $5,000 materials stipend.
Deadline: 11:59 p.m. EDT on August 10, 2025.
The Golden Foundation Residency (International)
The Golden Artist focuses on providing space for artists working with paint. Artists are provided with materials, 24/7 access to an open studio space, a private apartment, and more. There is no fee to attend, but artists are responsible for their own food and travel expenses. There is a $30 application fee.
Deadline: August 13, 2025.
Kolaj Magazine Photography and Collage Virtual Artist Residency (International)
The Photography & Collage Virtual Artist Residency is a month-long program inviting photographers and collage artists to come together in dialogue, learn from one another, and make artwork for a series of exhibitions that explore the intersection of collage and photography. The cost of the residency is $500 per artist, and a limited number of grants are available.
Deadline: August 19, 2025.
NAAS Research & Curatorial Fellowship (International)
This program supports researchers, curators, and cultural practitioners from the Arabic-speaking region and its diasporas who critically engage with cinema, media, and visual culture. Fellows receive a stipend, mentorship, publishing opportunities, and more.
Deadline: August 22, 2025.
ON::VIEW Artist Residency Program (International)
Located in the heart of Savannah’s Starland District at ARTS Southeast, the ON::VIEW Artist Residency provides a free, high-visibility studio space for an artist to complete a new project, continue an in-progress endeavor, or conduct research exploring conceptual, material, performative, and social practices. There is a $50 application fee.
Deadline: 11:59 p.m. EDT on September 21, 2025.
Culinary Artist in Residency at Ox-Bow (International)
This program is open to anyone using food as material for creative practice and takes place in two parts: a 10-day stay in winter and a public program in summer. Residents receive lodging, a $350 travel stipend, a $200 materials budget, and a $1,500 artist fee.
Deadline: 11:59 p.m. on September 30, 2025.
If you’d like to list an opportunity, please contact [email protected].
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article August 2025 Opportunities: Open Calls, Residencies, and Grants for Artists appeared first on Colossal.
2025-07-30 05:04:38
If we were to travel 500 years into the future, what would the monuments decorating public parks and town squares commemorate? Thomas Doyle takes us on an unnerving journey to imagine the culture we might encounter should our endless fascination with technology continue.
The New York-based artist (previously) toys with perception as he sculpts miniature works at 1:43 scale and smaller. His new dystopian series, Clear History, invokes classical Greek and Roman sculpture, although the venerated figures appear more as a warning than an ideal. Sharp rays pierce through a woman’s head in “Clickthrough rate,” for example, while the hunched protagonist of “Opt in” demonstrates the neck-cranking posture many of us know all too well.
Interested in the long tail of culture, Doyle frequently looks to the past to better understand the consequences of our present. “I’m fascinated by the way we are hurtling toward what seems to be a new way of being human, leaping without looking, hoping for the best,” he says.
In each of the mixed-media scenes, tiny figures peer up at or sit near the weathered statues as they consider a world that’s come and gone. “The trappings of past cultures are all around us, morphed and made nearly unrecognizable over centuries,” the artist adds. “I’ve tried to trace the ways in which today’s technologies will reverberate over time. What will grow from the seeds we plant today? What becomes a venerated symbol? What serves as a cautionary myth?”
Doyle currently has a few models on view at the Ukrainian National Museum in Chicago, and he very generously shares glimpses behind the scenes on Instagram.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article In Miniature Models, Thomas Doyle Envisions an Unsettling Future of Technological Takeover appeared first on Colossal.
2025-07-30 01:19:17
In the bold, imagined portraits of Sofia Bonati (previously), women gaze confidently from swaths of fabric and symmetrical organic elements. Whether cloaking her figures in geometric patterns or natural details like insect wings, each individual gazes directly at the viewer amid vibrant backgrounds and elegant garments.
Bonati often derives her patterns and outfits from historical sources, especially hairstyles and gowns from the early 20th century. Surrounded by optical designs and repetitive motifs, her compositions are as nostalgic and surreal as they are contemporary. Find more on the artist’s website and Instagram.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Hypnotic Patterns Envelop Sofia Bonati’s Nostalgic and Stylish Imagined Portraits appeared first on Colossal.
2025-07-29 23:20:41
Andy Goldsworthy grew up on the edge of Leeds, with Yorkshire’s rural fields in one direction and the city’s urban center in the other. As a teenager, he worked on local farms, which instilled an early respect for the land—and a fascination that would blossom into an interdisciplinary art practice throughout the next several decades. Based for the last forty years in Dumfriesshire in southern Scotland, the artist continues to draw inspiration from the forests, hills, and fields of this picturesque part of Britain.
Employing a wide range of materials and settings from stones and leaves to streams and trees, the artist creates encounters that explore human interactions with the land. “The intention is…not to mimic nature but to understand it,” he told NPR in 2015. Temporary installations, typically documented after completion and then left to elements, mirror the way nature is always changing, whether going through cycles, evolving over time, or being actively transformed by human forces.
The National Galleries of Scotland presents a new retrospective, Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years, in the Royal Scottish Academy building. Celebrating the trailblazing artist’s career, the survey features more than 200 photographs, sketchbooks, sculptures, installations, and archival items dating from some of his earliest experiments in the mid-1970s to pieces conceived for the show this year.
Goldsworthy draws our attention to nature and the way it behaves—or doesn’t—by conjuring uncanny occurrences. A crack in fallen leaves resembles a fissure in the earth, or he highlights a hole in an elm tree by literally outlining the jagged opening in bright yellow. The artist also interacts with nature through physical participation, like climbing through a wintry hedgerow as if challenging its function as a boundary and demonstrating its possibilities as a conduit instead.
Goldsworthy learned many of the techniques he employs in his practice through his early experiences working on farms in Yorkshire. He baled hay, prepared fields for planting through a method called harrowing, fed livestock, and piled stones. In art school, he began experimenting with photography and film to document ephemeral works he created in the landscape.
Throughout the past five decades, Goldsworthy has established himself as a leading contemporary land artist, influenced by the work of seminal figures like Robert Smithson and Joseph Beuys and in turn influencing the work of younger artists like Jon Foreman or Laura Ellen Bacon. Goldsworthy emphasizes the beauty and nobility of working the land, not by trying to control it but by working in tandem with his surroundings and to illuminate details and patterns we might not otherwise see.
The human relationship with the natural environment continues to be a central focus of Goldsworthy’s interventions, from a piece for which he carved up chunks of snow and hauled them across the countryside to the way he interprets the interior space of the Royal Scottish Academy building for the current exhibition. A large-scale installation called “Oak Passage,” for example, transforms a gallery into a tidy thicket with a lane through the center, presenting both a barrier and a channel, depending on how it’s approached.
While he doesn’t generally view himself as a performer, he often portrays himself in the midst of interventions, capturing the activities in photos and film. A public context for his pieces, whether installed inside or outdoors, invites people to move around and activate the work. For this exhibition, his interactions with the historic Royal Scottish Academy building are conceived as a single work, considering the continuum of history, people, art, and the elements that have had an impact on the site over time.
Find more on the artist’s website. Plan your visit to Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years, which continues through November 25 in Edinburgh, on the museum’s website. Head down the road to the National Museum of Scotland and keep an eye out for a small sculpture by Goldsworthy permanently marking the entrance to the atmospheric Early People display. And if you’re headed to Yorkshire, discover four permanent installations by the artist along the Andy Goldsworthy Trail.
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2025-07-29 06:09:02
In the 1800s, mycology—the study of fungi—was a relatively new field, emerging around the same time as Enlightenment-era studies in botany and herbal medicine. Science and art converged in works like Elizabeth Blackwell’s A Curious Herbal, along with German naturalist Lorenz Oken’s seven-volume Allgemaine Naturgeschichte, consisting of more than 5,000 pages dedicated to classifying everything from beetles and fish to mushrooms and ferns.
In the late 19th century in Maryland, Mary Elizabeth Banning (1822–1903) emerged as one of America’s first mycologists—and the first woman to describe a new fungus species to science. The self-taught artist and scientist is now the focus of a nature-centered exhibition at New York State Museum, Outcasts: Mary Banning’s World of Mushrooms. The show features 28 original watercolors and detailed records of various mushroom species from the unpublished manuscript of her book, The Fungi of Maryland. In fact, of the 175 species she documented, 23 of them were unknown to science at the time.
Banning’s manuscript is dedicated to Charles H. Peck, whose role as New York State Botanist—and an enthusiastic mycologist—at the NYSM formed the foundation of a 30-year correspondence with Banning. As a woman in an almost entirely male field, who also lacked formal biology degrees, Banning was largely ostracized from professional proceedings at the time, but her work did not go unrecognized. Peck published some of her findings in the Annual Report in 1871, and he kept her manuscript in a drawer at NYSM, where it remained for more than nine decades.
A handful of Banning and Peck’s letters are included in Outcasts, along with some of Peck’s lab equipment, mushroom specimens that Banning collected, and a dozen early 20th-century wax models of fungi from the NYSM Natural History Collection.
Along with Banning’s vibrant illustrations, the exhibition introduces visitors to the mycological universe, including prehistoric specimens like Prototaxites. A fossilized example of the ancient life form was found in Orange County, New York. Around 420 to 370 million years ago, these unique organisms would have towered over the landscape at up to 26 feet high.
Outcasts: Mary Banning’s World of Mushrooms continues through January 4 in Albany. Learn more and plan your visit on the museum’s website.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article ‘Outcasts’ Highlights the Scientific Contributions of Trailblazing Artist and Naturalist Mary Banning appeared first on Colossal.