Application opening date: Wednesday, November 30, 2022

Deadline for applications: 11:59pm (CT), Tuesday, February 28, 2023

Apply Here

Austin Central Library invites artists, collectives, curators and beyond to submit proposals for consideration to exhibit at the 2700sq ft. gallery between January 2024-September 2024. Selections will be made by impartial juries comprised of local artists, curators, educators and community leaders through a jury-scoring process. Candidates will be announced in early March 2023. It is free to apply and the call is open to applicants residing in Texas.

Upon acceptance of a proposal, an artist stipend will be offered.

• Exhibitors are responsible for all cost related to the production of artworks, installation, de-installation, shipping, and traveling
• No manipulation can be done on the floor of the gallery space
• No hanging/ suspending items from the ceiling
• Should the walls be painted, the cost of the labor and materials are the exhibitor's responsibility
• Exhibitors are responsible for providing structures, furniture, and equipment other than what the Library can offer

Consideration for Community Exhibition:

Austin Central Library offers alternative spaces, such as the collection areas, lounge spaces and conference rooms for smaller exhibits of two-dimensional artwork. If you would like your application to be considered for this opportunity, please mark your answer in the application. This exhibit is voluntary without compensation.  Each submitted work must be less than 40lbs and have a display mechanism for the wall-mount track system provided by the Library. Once jurors make the selections, the final exhibiting location will be determined by the Exhibit Coordinator.

Please contact Exhibit Coordinator, Nicole Parker at nicole.parker@austintexas.gov for any questions.

Examples of previous artists shown left to right: Irene Roderick, Randal Ford, Akirash, Calder Kamin, Maria Fernanda Borrero

Hannah Hannah is a self-taught, Austin-based and Boston-born artist. Her primary mediums are acrylic and spray paint she applies to canvas, murals, and to vintage clothing and accessories. Her subjects frequently take shape as abstract, yet clarifying, renditions of human and animal expressions. Humans especially fascinate Hannah Hannah: how they think, what motivates and moves them. Her frequent use of bright colors match her soul's vibrancy, an essential communicative instinct that radiates to and through her world.

Release the Puppets celebrates the playground of imagination, where stories come to life through puppetry and music. Puppeteers use movement and sound to tell stories that reflect our lives and culture. For 45 years, Austin Public Library’s Literature Live! has welcomed audiences into a world of make-believe through the art of puppetry. So, suspend your disbelief, and release the puppets!

Opening Reception–   Sunday, October 16, 2022, 1–3 PM

landscape addresses the complexities among intimacy, pleasure, and authority as it concerns the opaque relationship between public and private desires that constitute queer identity. Inspired by the queer history of Texas, landscape examines place and how that affects the queer lived experience.

An exhibition of dozens of kites created by artists and representing the connection between water and life in Texas, The Sacred Springs Kite Exhibition, will be on display at Austin Central Library starting May 6, 2022. The exhibition, set to hang over library visitors in the Central Library’s six-story atrium space, is a collaboration between Austin Public Library; Art4Water, a program of the Watershed Association; and Terry Zee Lee, a national facilitator and curator of kite exhibitions and events.

“Austin Central Library, located where Shoal Creek feeds into Lady Bird Lake and about a mile from Barton Springs, is the perfect location for the community to experience an exhibition on the connection between Texas waters and our lives,” stated Austin Public Library Director Roosevelt Weeks. “We are proud to be able to host these beautiful artworks in our space and connect the community with these artists’ important messages.”

The exhibition will be visible throughout the Central Library, and is scheduled to be on display through November, 2022. A free opening reception is scheduled from 7:00pm – 9:00pm on May 6, 2022 at the Central Library, featuring presentations from the sponsors of the event and several of the featured artists, as well as tours of the exhibition.
 

Sacred Springs Kite Exhibition Opening Reception
May 6, 2022 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Austin Central Library, 6th Floor
710 W. Cesar Chavez St.
Austin, TX 78701
Free and open to the public

“Clean and plentiful water serves as the lifeblood of our communities - our Texas Springs are vital gathering places for community connection and relief from the summer heat,” stated David Baker, Executive Director of the Watershed Association. “What would Austin be without Barton Springs at the heart and soul of our city?”

More information about the exhibition is available at: www.art4water.com

Flowers can communicate strong emotions and can also be appreciated for their simplistic beauty. At key moments of our lives, we exchange flowers as symbols of love, sympathy, and celebration. Over the past few years, in the absence of ceremonies, I paused to examine the traditions, rituals and other countless occasions when cut flowers are used to decorate ceremonies - adorn the deceased or embellish a bridal altar.

The wildflowers depicted here are not explored within the context of their natural environment or the prim and trimmed specimens of the florist, but instead these quirky wild ones with all their flaws were plucked from my pandemic walks, a representation of the uncertainties we’ve experienced, as well as the beauty of a spontaneous agenda. Serendipity. For me, painting a bouquet of wildflowers and capturing their unruly folds and colors has been a meditative and life-affirming act. Their impermanent beauty and joy giving in to the sweltering summer heat only to regenerate yet again.

It was never a goal to accurately express their ephemeral beauty. These bouquets show up as synesthetic explosions of senses - possibly finding a moment of stillness, a split second to be present amidst a chaotic world.

PART ONE
April 24 – May 14, 2022 | Artists of Seoul, Korea HONG soun   –   erin CHON   –   BYUN soonchoel   –   sangdon KIM   –   youngjoo CHO

PART TWO
May 17 – June 6, 2022 | Artists of Gwangju, Korea KIM sangyeon   –   KANG un   –   PARK il-ku   –   AN hee-jeong   –   JEONG jeong ha

Paired with “Wider West”, the “Deeper East” exhibition was launched as an international intercity art exhibition program in 2018 by a Texas-based art consultancy, Shine Here. “Deeper East” introduces artists in Asian cities to Western cities while “Wider West” represents artists in Western cities to Asian cities.

In 2019, “Wider West” was held in Seoul showcasing eight artists from Texas, and “Deeper East” in Austin, a paired exhibition was postponed to 2022 due to a worldwide pandemic. The first part of “Deeper East” is a long-delayed paired exhibition from 2019 for five artists in Seoul, and the second part for five artists in Gwangju, South Korea. The next “Wider West'' (dates TBD) will be held in Gwangju—a culturally enriched city in Joella-do, a southern province in South Korea.

A major advantage of virtual/digital exhibitions hosted by Shine Here is that it is very cost-efficient compared to traditional art exhibitions. These digital exhibitions are not meant to replace the existing format of an exhibition but rather to introduce more culturally diverse artists to the international stage in a more economical way.

Artists were selected from a list of recommendations from Shine Here’s panel of art professionals and affiliated partners in Korea. In most cases, each artist showcases a total of 20-25 pieces that are edited together.

Closing Reception 
May 28, 2022, 2 – 3 PM | Dance Performance janet PARK

Art and culture surrounded Kel Brown throughout his life. Born in Blue Island, IL, and raised in Houston, TX, Brown started painting and drawing at an early age, later discovering and identifying with graffiti and street art. Following in the footsteps of other self-taught African-American artists from the global South, his upbringing continues to shape the tenor of his paintings to this day. An ever-evolving experiment in balance, harmony, shape, and form, Kel Brown’s work seeks to push abstraction into unexplored visual realms and awaken dormant consciousness in the viewer. Brown’s work is a product of both the shy and the overbearing; it is a visual symphony of duality, contradiction, oneness, and harmony. Heavily influenced by Hip-hop and Jazz, his work relies heavily on improvisation, workflow, and improvements on the fly.

The Outpost reading room at APL exhibits a collection of drawings, sculptures, and backdrop paintings staged alongside Welch’s self-published comic book series, Holdouts. The story peers into a future where the US Gulf coastline has shifted dramatically inland, coastal states have been left without a governing body, and only a small, scattered populace remain, each navigating an unpredictable and harsh biome.

Reception: December 11, 2021, 2 – 4 PM

AUSTIN, TX - #metoo, #blacklivesmatter and the inequities amplified by the pandemic have put gender and racial justice in Austin in the spotlight. Yet, Austin has decades long history of female changemakers championing diversity and equity in education, social justice, media, technology and public leadership decades before it was trending - de-segregating higher education, UT athletics, even Barton Springs and so much more.

Austin Public Library and Library Foundation will present Legends Mosaics: Austin’s Courageous Female Leaders of Color, six commemorative mosaic portraits produced in a collaboration between Latinitas, Austin’s only bilingual STEM nonprofit for 20 years and six Austin female artists of color outside the central library branch (710 W. Cesar Chavez) on the East Shoal Creek Amphitheater.

Honored through art:
Dr. Martha Cotera, founding member Chicana Caucus
Dr. Teresa Lozano Long, educator, philanthropist
Dr. Bertha Sadler Means, educator, social justice advocate
Sylvia Orozco, founder Mexic-Arte Museum
Cathy Revilla Vasquez, founder La Prensa newspapers
Peggy Vasquez, producer, journalists, social justice advocate

Awake in the Dark is a multimedia exhibition resulting from a collaboration between visual artist Hollis Hammonds and poet Sasha West. The pieces begin what Timothy Morton calls “grief work,” articulating the experience of living in the midst of a fragile, changing ecosystem. Through self-interrogations, the artists question both individual and societal contributions to environmental crisis. Viewers dwell in wreckage, suspended between flood and fire, stasis and loss. Objects lose their meaning as markers for a normal existence. In these works, the distinction between natural and human-made disasters starts to collapse.

Hammonds’ drawings reflect the melancholy and darkness manifest in West’s poems, asking us to reexamine the impact of elements when those elements are fed by human actions. Hammonds often draws inspiration from a fire that consumed her childhood home in Independence, Kentucky, when she was 15 years old. In the context of climate change, that displacement takes on new meaning. Rather than being an aberration of the past, the incident foretells a potentially apocalyptic future.

West’s poems connect to the landscapes of ruin in Hammonds’ drawing, questioning our culture’s belief in limitless growth. Collapsing time, her speakers range across eras and historical events to try and articulate their role as witnesses in the first generation to feel palpably the effects of climate change (mere decades after global warming was first named). Her speakers work to name the complex spaces of responsibility, despair, and hope.

Combining sound with sculptural installation and words with images, both artists offer their personal vantage points on the precipice of a forbidding future. The show opens liminal spaces where hard boundaries dissolve: past disasters forecast future ones, the crackle of fire becomes the cracking of ice, what is civilization becomes wilderness. Hammonds and West invite viewers to see anew their own part in making the physical world and, thus, the future.

¡Se Ha Dicho! explores the power of words in art and everyday lives of Hispanic and Latinx communities, whether emulating the rallying speech of a community organizer, the soothing rhythm of a lullaby shared from mother to daughter, or an astute connection scribbled in the margins of a book. The work presented here is a celebration of the power of a community with deep and diverse stories to tell, as we live with the daily-learned lesson of just how much words matter.

Artists: Cande Aguilar, Julia Barbosa Landois, Paco Castro, Christian Cruz, Ulyses Cueto, Veronica Gaona, Evelyn Gonzalez, Suzy Gonzalez, Siri Gurudev, Rafael Fernando Gutierrez, Barbara Miñarro, Monica Teresa Ortiz, Alexandra Robinson, Miguel Rodriguez, Alán Serna, Jesus Valles. Exhibit curated by Michael Anthony Garcia.

This project is supported by the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department.

Canceled-Postponed-Rescheduled
FAGILEE-SIWAJU-TUNTO

There is a saying that hunger is the root of many problems. If we can solve hunger, other solutions will follow. The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the fragility of our food system, leaving many food insecure for the first time in their lives, and deepening the problem for many others already living on the edge.

As many were doing around the world, I started helping elderly, mobility challenged, and unhoused people get groceries. As I ordered online to have food delivered, I encountered a deluge of boxes and food packaging.

I started collecting the food boxes in my studio. As I watched the piles build, I decided to use them to create an artwork to speak to the moments of this past year:  the encounters, the struggles, disappointments, and successes. To speak to the ghostliness of empty streets and stores, and the moments of grace and gratefulness for one’s blessings, even though we were all afraid of what might happen next.

As I built these mini grocery stores, I thought of the relationships we build and how covid is pulling them down brick by brick. I thought of the hands and souls have touched the packages and mourned some of them who passed.

The colors were arranged to invoke the ceaseless news and information flow on social media and the internet; the day-to-day report on the progress of finding a cure, how many people are affected, infected, surviving or dying all around the world, and the statistics of economies failing.

Finally, our prayers are answered. With hope, confidence, perseverance, belief, trust, and togetherness we have done it. The cure is here. I have received mine. What about you? Let us all do our part to keep our communities and families safe.

Opening Reception - Saturday, August 14, 2 – 4 PM 

The artworks of Irene Roderick are Art made in the tradition of Fine Art that is based on individual creativity and unique personal expression. They are also Quilts made in the Craft tradition of utilitarian bed covers incorporating small pieces of fabric sewn together into a larger sheet. Roderick’s works join the centuries old conversation of whether quilts can be considered as fine art or remain firmly in the craft tradition. She works fluidly between these conversations, embracing both traditions with nonchalance to receive approvals for her creativity from anyone.

Exhibition: May 1 - December 31, 2021

Rakhee Jain Desai is an interdisciplinary artist whose work creates dialogue about immigrant identity and belonging. Her current body of work utilises the centuries-old, wax-resist textile technique, Batik. The combination of Batik, an Eastern craft, with traditionally Western mediums (encaustic, oils and acrylics) is a signature process.