SKY: An International Call for Works of Art About the Sky

The Cincinnati based non-profit arts organization and gallery, Manifest, invites visual artists and designers to submit works about the sky, the things that travel through it, the phenomena in it, and how we try touch it. Open to all traditional and non-traditional genre and media.

The sky is an aspirational place. Its distance from us likely has something to do with that everything in it is out of reach. We spend most of our lives looking into it while trapped firmly on the ground. Our time in the sky exists in the brief moments we can separate ourselves from the earth and fully immerse ourselves into the void.

The strange thing about our perceived distance is that the sky does not sit, untouchable, on the other side of a barrier. The sky is intimately pressed against us, traveling down into our lungs, holding us together with 15 pounds of pressure per square inch. In this sense, the sky is our mold. We are intimate with the sky, while simultaneously feeling so far away from everything inside of it.

The sky is naturally divided into layers: places where life can exist, where weather is formed, where satellites travel at high speed. It is divided into airspace, fraught boundaries that determine safety and sovereignty.

The sky is beautiful. It is full of stars. It is full of clouds, birds, planes, kites, microbes, dust motes, noise, light. It is very cold. The sky burns meteors to ash and presents them as shooting stars.

The sky has an end and shields us from the true void of space even as it frames it as starscape.

How does something finite feel so infinite?

$40 for up to FOUR entries submitted. $5 per each additional entry.

ANNUAL CASH AWARD: The annual Manifest Grand Jury Prize will result in the awarding of one significant cash prize ($5000) to a single work selected as the 'best of the entire season'.