Call for Art: Craft Ecologies
Promotional image for Craft Ecologies Call for Art. Over a dark brown background with an image of intertwined roots, text reads: “Fresh Eye Arts and Gallery; Craft Ecologies; Open Call: Apply by 9.6.26; Guest Curators: Pamela Vázquez Torres + Emma Wood.”
About Craft Ecologies
Craft Ecologies builds on an ongoing curatorial interest in ecological interdependence and more-than-human systems. It expands this inquiry toward material practices that sustain and carry knowledge, bringing together artists whose practices engage biomaterials and material traditions through contemporary approaches to making.
Viewed through a broader historical lens, biomaterials have long been part of human handcraft and craft traditions, continually reimagined and repurposed in response to contemporary issues. Rather than framing biomaterials through innovation or future-oriented narratives, the exhibition considers how materials and traditional forms of making actively shape relationships between people, place, labor, material histories, and shared environments. Materials are understood as sites of relation where cultural, ecological, and embodied knowledge is formed and re-formed through practice.
The exhibition is also grounded in a context where material practices continue to play an active role in how communities respond to changing conditions, from everyday acts of care and maintenance to moments of collective strain and adaptation. Craft Ecologies recognizes these practices as ongoing forms of care, resilience, and retelling, shaping how communities navigate ecological and social change.
Open Call Framework
The open call invites submissions from artists working across but not limited to queer ecologies, traditional techniques, and hybrid craft, with biomaterials serving as the primary material in their practice.
Biomaterials and material traditions are broadly understood here to include organic, living, cultivated, foraged, or naturally sourced materials, as well as practices rooted in textile traditions, craft lineages, vernacular knowledge, and material experimentation. This may include, but is not limited to, organic textiles, handmade paper and plant fibers, bioplastics, natural fiber weaving, crop-based materials, hair, collaborations with living organisms, hybrid or experimental materials, and contemporary approaches to traditional craft. The exhibition welcomes work across a range of media and formats, including installation, sculpture, textiles, moving image, sound, and interdisciplinary or site-responsive practices.
We encourage submissions from artists whose work engages:
Traditional techniques and their contemporary reinterpretation
Textiles, fibers, weaving, basketry, and related practices
Foraging, gathering, cultivation, and land-based relationships
Natural pigments, dyes, and organic processes
Folk, ritual, or community-based forms of making
Important dates
Applications due: September 6
Exhibition Dates: October 1 - November 22
Opening Reception: October 2, 6-8pm; Masks-required viewing hour from 5-6pm
Black and white image of Guest Curators Pamela Vázquez Torres (left) and Emma Wood (right).
About the curators
Pamela Vázquez Torres (she/her) is an art historian, curator, producer, and interdisciplinary artist from Mexico based in Minneapolis. She has collaborated on public art and curatorial projects presented locally and beyond. Since 2021, she has been part of the winter public art on-ice program Art Shanty Projects. She was awarded a 2023 Creative Response Grant from the City of Minneapolis and was an Emerging Curators Institute Fellow (2022–2023).
Emma Wood (they/them/hen) is a Swedish-American interdisciplinary artist and arts facilitator based between Denmark and Minneapolis. Their work has been exhibited internationally, and they have received fellowships and residencies from The Emerging Curator’s Institute, Franconia Sculpture Park, Cafesjian Art Trust Museum, Chicago Fire Arts Center, The American Swedish Institute, Art Shanty Projects, and Venice Glass Week. Emma is currently pursuing a Bachelor's in Craft: Glass and Ceramics at the Royal Danish Academy in Denmark.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
