Hot Bed is excited to announce WACK!, the Summer 2023 open call celebrating our fifth anniversary. We are looking for art that celebrates the most important thing in life: our ability to express our individual uniqueness. Selected works will be exhibited from June 17th through August 12, 2023.

Since its founding five years ago, Hot Bed has cultivated spaces where creativity flourishes. We provide the Philadelphia community with an environment of growth and enrichment carefully curated in our trademark biophilic space. Our goal is to help produce the next great idea. Our method? Leaning into the zany, the wild, the weird.

When the world gets too weird to comprehend, art & design of the moment reflect that. Weirdness is becoming the new norm. In light of forced detachment from pre-COVID lives, we’re interested in gathering the latest perspectives on the new and unfamiliar. WACK! invites artists from Philadelphia to lean into the absurdity of our present moment. We encourage artists to fearlessly embrace how “wack” life in Philly has become and show us what wonderful things this weirdness creates.

Artists are invited to think creatively about topics of interest, which include but are not limited to:

Boldness: brightness, energy, innovation, shock, uniqueness
Magic:cosmologies, fantasy, mysteries, planets, space, stars, the unknown
Politics: climates/climate change, communities, cultures, current events, infrastructures, political undercurrents, uprisings
Surrealism: absurdity, bizarreness, chaos, confusion, humor, infinity, spirals
Weirdness: anomalies, resistance, newness, subversive behavior, surprises, the unexpected, the unfamiliar

Submission guidelines can be found here: https://www.hotbedphilly.com/open-calls

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