LOST ARTS: A Call for Works By or About Legacy Creative Processes

The Cincinnati based non-profit arts organization and gallery, Manifest, invites visual artists and designers to submit works made about or using skills and materials the world may have moved on from, but still contain depth of potential, and unappreciated value.

A lost art is a skill or process that has fallen out of use: wet-plate colloidal photography, punch-card coding, cursive writing. As technologies develop, old ways of doing things fall out of memory in favor of what is newer, more fashionable, faster, or cheaper. The world moves on, leaving behind the detritus of tools and machines made to complete work that is no longer done. The knowledge of how to process film, how to weave, to mix egg-tempera paint, takes on a sacred, rarified, or even provincial quality.

Where does the knowledge go when the industrial, technologically-advanced world thinks it doesn’t need it anymore? How has being forgotten freed it? Who are the stewards of these lost arts?

$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.