Open Imagination
 May 01, 2026
Manifest - VELVET: A Call for Works About, Of, or By the Color Black
 Exhibitions

The Cincinnati based non-profit arts organization and gallery, Manifest, invites visual artists and designers to submit original works exploring or using the variance, darkness, and graphic power of the color black. Open to all traditional and non-traditional genre and media. The color black is full and empty, both the absence of and the completeness of color. Darkness is, on one hand, an unknowable void: cold, blind, and full of shadows. Alternately, it is the absorption of the entire spectrum, a glutton for light, radiating heat like summer asphalt melting the soles of your shoes, or black sands the sole of your feet. Black is particularly evocative given that we can explore the velvet of darkness with the sensory pleasure offered by gliding oily graphite across a page, firing stark and shining glazes, painting with brushes sated with ink, or cracking charcoal between our fingers as we draw. $45 for up to three entries submitted. $5 per each additional entry. Includes honorarium of $50 for each exhibiting artist and Grand Jury Award of $1,000 for one jury-selected work from among the exhibits on view.

 Includes honorarium of $50 for each exhibiting artist and Grand Jury Award of $1,000 for one jury-selected work from among the exhibits on view.
 International
 
  No
 
  Yes