Call for Art: Ancestral Futures

Curator: Donté K. Hayes

Application Deadline: Sunday, November 23, 2025

Apply here: https://www.arcgallery.org/calls-for-entry-archive/call-for-entries-ancestral-futures

What does it mean to be a good future ancestor? How might
today’s personal, cultural, social, and or environmental actions become
legacies for those who come after us? Ancestral Futures invites artists
to reflect on these questions through their creative practice. This juried
exhibition, curated by artist and ceramicist Donté K. Hayes, seeks works
that meditate on wisdom, intentionality, and the responsibility of shaping a
world that extends beyond ourselves.

Rather than envisioning utopia, this call for art asks how
we can honor the knowledge, experiences, and traditions of the past to
cultivate a present rooted in growth, self-improvement, and care. Cultural and
familial knowledge stand at the core of this exhibition. The stories,
traditions, lost histories, trauma and lessons passed down across generations
hold wisdom that can guide us toward becoming better ancestors. Through the act
of creation, artists are invited to transform these inheritances into artifacts,
monuments or markers to possible future selves and future community. In this
way, the works in Ancestral Futures will embody an ongoing dialogue
between past, present, and future.

We invite artists of all backgrounds and mediums to submit
artwork that explores the concept of the future ancestor though art.
Submissions can include painting, drawing, photography, digital art, sculpture,
mixed media, textiles, ceramics, and video. We encourage artists to draw on
personal experiences and observations in creating their work. We hope to
showcase a range of perspectives and styles that do service to the complex and
multifaceted nature of this topic. Through this call for art, we hope to shine
a light on the ethics of long-term thinking—what The Good Ancestor author Roman
Krznaric calls “deep-time humility.”

Deadline for Submission of Applications: Sunday, November
23, 2025 at 11:59pm CST

About the Curator:

Donté K. Hayes is a research-based artist residing and
working in Cliffwood, New Jersey. He graduated summa cum laude from Kennesaw
State University in Georgia with a BFA in Ceramics and Printmaking with an Art
History minor. Donté received his MA and MFA with honors from the University of
Iowa and is the 2017 recipient of the University of Iowa Arts Fellowship. Donté
has been awarded residencies at MacDowell, Bemis Center, Haystack Mountain
School of Crafts, Penland, Township 10, Watershed, Hambidge Center for Creative
Arts and Sciences and The Peninsula School of Art. His work is included in the
permanent collections of the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art
Museum, Minnesota Museum of American Art, Wellin Museum, Newark Museum of Art,
Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Gibbes Museum of Art, Newcomb Art Museum, Stanley
Museum of Art, Crocker Art Museum and the Des Moines Art Center among others.
Donté is a recipient of a 2023 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Individual
Artist fellowship. In 2022 he was awarded a prestigious Louis Comfort Tiffany
Foundation Biennial Grant Award. He is also a 2019 Ceramics Monthly Magazine
Emerging Artists and Artaxis Fellow. Donté K. Hayes is represented by Mindy
Solomon Gallery in Miami, Florida.

Apply here: https://www.arcgallery.org/calls-for-entry-archive/call-for-entries-ancestral-futures

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