CALL FOR ARTISTS – What We Carry Art Exhibition. Deadline July 24

🌱  What We Carry Art Exhibition CALL FOR ARTISTS –

What We Carry: A Community Art Exhibition & Dialogue is an artist-led exhibition  and social practice activation by Niki Lopez and What’s Your Elephant™

Presented by What’s Your Elephant™
Exhibition Dates: August 21, 2026 – September 10, 2026
Location: 1310 Gallery, Fort Lauderdale, FL

Submission Deadline: Friday, July 24, 2026, 11:59 PM EST

To submit your work, click the button above or go to: https://form.jotform.com/261875207083157

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

What We Carry: A Community Art Exhibition & Dialogue is an artist-led exhibition and community activation curated and produced by Niki Lopez and presented by What’s Your Elephant™, a 501(c)(3) arts and education nonprofit that uses art and facilitated dialogue to address what often goes unspoken.

This August, we are transforming 1310 Gallery at Sailboat Bend Artist Lofts into a space for art, reflection, storytelling, and community care.

Rooted in visual art, social practice, collage-making, and collective dialogue, What We Carry asks: What are we holding? What has been passed down? What have we survived? What are we ready to name, hold differently, or transform together?

The exhibition brings together selected works by invited and submitting artists whose practices engage themes of identity, memory, healing, belonging, resistance, grief, visibility, care, ancestry, and transformation. Select works by Niki Lopez may also be included, but What We Carry is not a solo exhibition. It is a curated community art exhibition shaped by multiple artists, perspectives, and lived experiences.

This project is not only about trauma or hardship. It is also about what sustains us: beauty, breath, ritual, creativity, community, humor, softness, spirit, memory, and the possibility of being held.

Curatorial Vision

What We Carry grows out of Niki Lopez’s long-standing practice as an artist, curator, and social practitioner using art as a bridge for reflection, healing, dialogue, and community connection.

The exhibition is shaped by questions that have moved through Lopez’s work for years: What do we hold in the body? What do we inherit? What remains unnamed? What helps us survive, soften, remember, release, and transform?

What We Carry is a curated community art exhibition that brings multiple artists and perspectives into conversation around memory, identity, grief, care, belonging, resistance, ancestry, restoration, and transformation.

Open to:  All mediums 2D work such as paintings, mixed-media, collages, fiber, digital and photography.  Interactive & installation pieces are highly considered. Select video works and sculptures will be considered.

ALL WORK MUST BE ORIGINAL WORK & HANG READY 

Fees
There is no mandatory fee to submit. However, a $20 suggested donation is encouraged to help offset exhibition and production costs. Donations can be made via WhatsYourElephant.org/donate.

For details on this exhibition & program, go to: https://whatsyourelephant.org/whatwecarry

Theme Guidance
Submitted artwork should fit or complement the theme:

What We Carry: A Community Art Exhibition & Dialogue

Artwork may explore the emotional, cultural, ancestral, political, and personal weight we hold — and the ways creativity helps us name, transform, release, and reimagine what lives within us.

Submissions may interpret the theme through personal, cultural, emotional, spiritual, ancestral, political, or social lenses.

We are especially interested in work that carries emotional truth, lived experience, reflection, or social meaning — not only visual beauty, but the story, feeling, or question beneath it.

Possible themes include:

• Identity
• Memory
• Healing
• Belonging
• Grief
• Resistance
• Visibility
• Care
• Ancestry
• Body as archive
• Inner peace
• Joy
• Softness
• Celebration
• Rest and restoration
• Survival and transformation
• Language, erasure, and naming the unspoken
• What we inherit
• What we release
• What we are learning to hold differently