Antenna Open Call Selections for 2020

Having open call opportunities to help elevate the work of fellow artists and writers is one of our greatest pleasures at Antenna, and so we are always super excited to make this announcement! These processes are always challenging, because we get SO MANY incredible applications both locally and from around the globe, and we never have enough spots for the amount of great folks that apply. For those who applied and didn’t get it this round, we suggest to try and try again! Persistence is key in a creative life that can have many rejections. Visit our submittable page to check out all of our current grant, residency, and exhibition opportunities. Antenna’s 2020 selections include:

Paper Machine Publishing Residency

In its second year, the Paper Machine Publishing Residency gives creators a month to develop a project that explores and challenges our concepts of books and print. 2020 selections include:

Meredith Davenport is a photographer whose work has appeared in National Geographic, the New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, and many other national and international publications. For her Paper Machine residency, She will develop a new set of chapbooks that continue a body of work that explores the themes around the brutality of the summer climate and the flooding of the Mississippi basin and how the psychology of weather relates to the history of enslavement in Louisiana and in particular to her ancestors.

Monica Haller is a photographer and a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow. She developed the book Riley and His Story and the Veterans Book Project, both significant art projects about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At Paper Machine she will create a book of photos and text centered around a parcel of land in Plaquemines Parish that has been in her family for six generations. For it, she will bring together materials by collaborators, family stories and archival research to explore environmental change and environmental racism, relationships to land, philosophies of ownership, and the social construction of race.

Ryan Leitner is a New Orleans based interdisciplinary artist creating in painting, photography, video, installation, and performance. His work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at venues across the country including the Plumbing Museum (Watertown, MA), AREA Gallery (Boston, MA), Barrett Art Center (Poughkeepsie, NY), and Lohio Gallery (Cincinnati, OH) and has had residencies including Manoog, Art Klub, and Chashama. With Paper Machine, he will work on an experimental non-linear book meant to be abstract representation of  the spectrum of genders and sexualities within his queer community.

Sarah Shotland is a literary artist, educator, and citizen. She is the author of the novel Junkette, and a playwright whose work has been performed in professional theaters around the world. She’s the co-founder and program director of Words Without Walls, which brings creative writing classes to jails, prisons, and drug treatment centers. Her project with Paper Machine will explore the language of prisons, which is coded, complex, and holds the contradictions of high-brow legal jargon and low-brow street culture slang. The project comes out of her decade of working through the complexity, depth, and specificity of prison writing groups.

Ingrid Sibley is a linguist, educator, performer, artist, art director, and graphic designer based in the Lower Ninth near the printshop in New Orleans. At Paper Machine, she will continue her Black Box zine project, focusing on New Orleans as the first stop in a global initiative of gathering and presenting Black voices worldwide. Delving more into various print processes, she hopes to create a private Black space for communication, healing autonomy and progress, through the medium of paper and the printed word, seeing those as the ultimate bridge builders.

Kady Ruth Ashcraft is a writer, filmmaker, and comedian, living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Films she has written and/or directed have been official selections of the New York Television Festival, Women in Comedy Festival, and the NYC Pop Up Film Festival. Her video & film work has been featured on NoBudge, Comedy Central, IFC, Funny or Die, and ABC Disney. She will use her time at Paper Machine to utilize traditional letterpress techniques to print a series of poetic and comedic broadsides to be hung in unexpected public spaces.

Spillways Fellowship

Throughout this year, these selected fellows will make initial visits to New Orleans and with the goal of developing proposals for potential future community engaged projects. Works that have resulted from Spillways residencies include the Slave Rebellion Reenactment initiated by Dread Scott, City Palette App by Chloë Bass, and Transient by Molly Rideout. 2020 Spillways Fellows include:

Tia-Simone Gardner is a cross-disciplinary artist whose practice engages Black feminismthrough a dialogue with ritual, iconoclasm, and geography. “Space,” she writes “can be produced as toxically gendered and racialized, often in ways that are illegible.” She is interested in how work grounded in hybrid drawing/time-based methods can activate and re-imagine thick sedimented layers of time, knowing, being, and struggle. Gardner has participated as a studio Fellow the Whitney Independent Study Program, and held residencies at IASPIS in Stockholm, Sweden and the Center for Photography in Woodstock, New York. She is a Birmingham native and currently lives in Minneapolis, MN.

Minyoung Lee writes fiction in San Francisco, CA. Her work appears in MoonPark Review, Vestal Review, JMWW, and more. Her forthcoming prose chapbook, Claim Your Space, tells the classic coming-of-age story using experimental narrative that plays with time, memory, and space. She is also writing a novel based on her experience working on an offshore oil platform off the Louisiana coast. Minyoung is a Tin House Summer Workshop Alum, a Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference – Hether Ludwick First Taste Scholar, and a winner of the Fear No Lit Submerging Writer Fellowship. She holds a BS in Chemical Engineering from Cornell University and an MBA from The University of Chicago.

Jayisha Patel is an award winning British filmmaker, who works at the intersection of cinematic film and VR. Her films have premiered at festivals such as the Berlinale, Toronto International Film Festival, Sundance, Locarno and New York Film Festival amongst others. Her works embody an intersectional female gaze and seek to give a platform to women of color fighting stereotypes, in bold and unconventional ways. She is on the advisory panel for the 2018 Oculus VR for Good Creator’s Lab and studied film at the International Film and TV School, Cuba (EICTV) and received her MA in Documentary Direction from the National Film and TV School, UK.

Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere are multidisciplinary artists whose projects and research investigate contemporary music and sound, the electromagnetic spectrum, dissent, and public fora. Their interests lie in the formation of itinerant, performative, and discursive-based social spaces with works that move between the spatial simultaneity of performance and enunciation, reflecting upon political agency through lyrics, audio, and transmission. Their practice and research span well over a decade of projects, performances, and art world experiences created together, and in project-based collaborations with musicians, radio practitioners, and city agencies.

Jody Wood uses mediums of social practice, video, photography, and performance. Her recent work reimagines routines in poverty support agencies, aiming to sculpt power dynamics, relationship networks, and resist stigmas surrounding poverty. Her site-specific work has been supported by A Blade of Grass, Esopus Foundation, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, McColl Center for Art + Innovation, and through residencies at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Yaddo, and Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been on view at Parrish Museum of Art in Water Mill, NY; Vox Populi, in Philadelphia, PA; Rond-Point Projects in Marseille, France; and the 8th Floor in NYC.

Antenna Solo Exhibition Open Call

Every year we select two individuals, one from a local and one from a national/international pool of hundreds of applicants to have the time and resources to develop an experimental solo exhibition Antenna’s mail gallery space. This year’s selections include:

Maria Lux (whose work is pictured here) is an artist who develops installation-based works about animals and their relationship to human knowledge. She earned her BFA from Iowa State University in 2006 and her MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2012. Lux is a member of Carnation Contemporary, an artist-run gallery space in Portland, Oregon and is currently an assistant professor of art at Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA.

Marta Rodriguez Maleck is based in New Orleans and works in video and installation, engaging people in participatory methods of storytelling that encourage communal accountability, healing, and understanding. Her work explores how much agency we have, as individuals and communities, in narrating our own experiences. By creating environments conducive to self-reflection, she explores the roles we play in our interactions with one another and where the intersections of our identities and prejudices lie.

Antenna Reading Room Exhibitions

Throughout the year we accept proposals for exhibitions at the intersection of visual and literary arts to be displayed in our downstairs reading room space. This year’s accepted proposals include:

Redress Papers by Tyler Starr is an exhibition of three artist’s books that shed light on unresolved murder cases involving the Ku Klux Klan. The work approaches this divisive subject obliquely to offer multiple points of entry with the hope of encouraging further investigation and acknowledgement of social injustices. The project makes a reconstructive use of archives reevaluating ways the past imbues present social conflicts.

The Fine Art of Self Publishing curated by Suzy Gonzalez is a group exhibition highlighting POC zine-makers whose visual art and the zines they publish are in conversation with one another. As someone who has been making zines since 2011, and as co-organizer of the San Antonio Zine Fest, Suzy’s network of zine publishing visual artists is constantly expanding, and she’s excited to present the growing number of artists who simultaneously create both zines and art objects, exploring issues within academia, labor, immigration, women’s rights, and food justice to celebrating queerness, intersectional feminism, body image, decolonization, and more. Works will range from collage, printmaking, painting, and small sculptures.

CMYKings recently closed in the Antenna Reading Room space and is an annual exchange of zines by an ever-changing national group of artists, organized by Philadelphia-based book artist Amanda D’Amico. The mission of the project is to honor print history, to embrace print technology, to use restrictions as inspiration, to make new work by any means necessary, and to support and encourage fellow artists. Our individual contributions are supplemented by collaborative studio dates as needed.

Paper Machine Publications

Every year, we publish 10-12 limited edition artist and writer-driven publications, as a result of residencies, exhibitions, and open call processes. Become an Antenna::Box subscriber and get these books delivered to your doorstep when they are released:

Chapbook Selection: Desahogando: an Undrowning by Karla Rosas: In Spanish, “desahogar” translates as “to vent.” However, taken part by part — des – ahogar — then becomes “to undrown.” Desahogando is an act of undrowning ,a series of prose poems and illustrations that reflect on the impacts of migration and illegality on love, self-identity, family history and memory.

Comics/Graphic Novel Selections: Honest Monument by Dan Rule explores a mix of philosophical and scientific questions with surreal drawings and situations. Boxridge Table by Orion Wertz is a story of a farm commune in a near future post-petroleum America. The protagonist, Abram, is the “Left Hand” of the Boxridge Table. He is tasked with maintaining order and safety against external threats, which include marauding swarms of dangerous insects. Abram’s job becomes more complex when a lethal accident is discovered to have been a murder.