Description of the Exhibition
July 12-16 2024, The Simmering Spices Art Collective is hosting our first ever gallery in New York City! This gallery creates an intimate, inviting, and innovative space to explore what educational justice could look like for the New York tri-state area’s Girls and Femmes of Color (GFOC). We realize the importance of amplifying GFOC storytelling and view our work as one that is in conversation with artists. We invite you to apply to have your art featured in our gallery.
Goals
We aim to create a safe, cozy, and familiar space that spotlights the voices of fellow GFOC by exhibiting artworks by artists who identify as GFOC. By exhibiting artworks by GFOC artists, we aim to illuminate the way we view our world and our experiences, especially when it comes to our education system and the ways we learn, thus reckoning with the many times we have had to stay silent. Our work strives to: critique the educational systems in schools as they currently exist and function in which GFOC are largely underrepresented and marginalized, celebrate the kinds of learning GFOC do beyond classrooms and get to see how we learn in both the informal and formal learning setting, and learn about how GFOC imagines educational justice and the future it could bring. Uniting with warmth, we invite you to contribute to this gallery and enjoy the work that was put into this amazing simmering spice blend.
This exhibition will seek to explore these questions:
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What does your experience with in-school learning look or feel like?
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How does your community contribute to your education? What does your own learning with the community (beyond school settings) around you look like?
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Beyond in-school learning, how does your education travel outside the classroom? For instance, what have you learned through your friendships? Community? Family? Etc.
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What are your hopes for the future of education in your community? What does educational justice look or feel like to you?
What Kind of Art Are We Accepting?
For this project, we will feature a range of artworks across disciplines, practices, and media – from sculpture to painting, drawing to digital works. Given the limited gallery space, we are unable to accept colossal or large-scale works of art. Point of reference for size: if you can carry it on the subway or on the bus, it qualifies!
Who is Eligible?
We invite artists who identify as GFOC, ranging from the ages 12 to 21, located in the tri-state area of New York, to participate in our gallery. Though students often become aware of our own educational experiences at very young ages, we find that as pre-teens and young adults we begin to solidify and finalize our views and lessons of our past. We are also inspired by the open-mindedness, thoughtfulness, intelligence, observance, and curiosity of girls and femmes of color, who each have their own roles in their communities and in fashioning their own narratives. Finally, we hope to bring people together in order to see how big our community and crowd really is, and to create and keep connections with fellow GFOC as well.
Benefits of Participating in this Project
Benefits of submitting work to the Simmering Spices Art collective include opportunities to:
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publicly display your work in a New York City gallery
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be mentored by a woman and femme of color who works in the arts
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benefit from professional and creative workshops(cookbook zine-making, keynote discussions with a WOC artist, a chance to learn something new about the art world) Workshops in the kitchen?
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participate in a community space for and by GFOC artists in the tri-state area
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gain confidence as an artist
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possibly contribute your artwork in a book about the gallery.