Most exhibition opportunities are decided on who you are. CVs, previous shows, institutional affiliations, and the quiet arithmetic of who a selector already knows. If you haven’t done it before, it’s hard to be chosen to do it.
apexart’s Open Call is built specifically to remove that. Proposals are judged anonymously, on the idea alone, by a jury of hundreds of people scattered across the world. It’s one of the few genuinely open doors in the field, and the next round opens October 1 and closes October 31, 2026, for the 2027–28 season.
The essentials
- Submission window: October 1–31, 2026
- No application fee
- 500 words maximum. That’s the entire proposal.
- Anonymous: no name, no biographical statement, no CV, no links and no images
- What you propose: a focused, idea-driven, original group exhibition of three or more artists
- Who can apply: anyone, internationally — artists, curators, students, writers. No curatorial training or prior experience required.
What you get
- US$10,000 exhibition budget per selected project
- Up to US$2,000 honorarium for the curator or organiser
- The exhibition is realised within apexart’s programming in New York, with funding and staff support — apexart is a venue that produces the show, not a grant-maker that hands over money
How the jury works, and why it’s unusual
A crowdsourced international jury of more than 600 people across 70 countries votes. The system ensures jurors don’t see submitters’ names and that every proposal gets an equal number of views. Projects are assessed on the strength of the idea and how well it’s communicated. Professional connections, previous achievements and reputation are explicitly not part of the evaluation.
It is, as far as we know, the closest thing the exhibition world has to a blind audition.
How to use the constraints
The 500-word limit and the ban on images are not obstacles, they’re the format. Three things follow:
Lead with the idea in the first two sentences. A juror reading dozens of proposals decides quickly whether yours is a thought or a theme. “An exhibition about memory” is a theme. A specific, arguable proposition is a thought.
You cannot show the work, so describe it. With no images and no links, every artwork exists only as your description of it. Concrete beats evocative: what a visitor sees, hears and does in the room.
Don’t smuggle in your credentials. Anonymity is enforced, and phrasing that identifies you (“building on my residency at…”) works against you. For once, you are only your idea — which is the point, and for anyone without a track record it’s the best offer going.
apexart publishes past winning proposals, which is the most useful preparation available. Read a dozen before you write.