Submission Guidelines for 2010 River City Biennale

 

Contact: Ann Resnick or Elizabeth Stevenson

Telephone: (316) 265-7137

E-mail: rivercitybiennale@cox.net

Website: http://www.rivercitybiennale.com

Blog: http://www.biennale2008.wordpress.com

River City Biennale is an art exhibit and cultural event with the goal of bringing serious attention to artists in Wichita, Kansas. We hope to bring the best and most critically viable contemporary art being created in Wichita to a national audience of critics, curators, gallery and museum professionals and collectors.

Opening in the spring of 2010, RCB hopes that the Biennale will increase the opportunities for Wichita artists to be included in major regional, national, and international exhibitions. RCB will host exhibits in several venues and will include panel discussions and distinguished speakers on topics related to contemporary art. This is a concerted effort to connect what’s going on here with what’s going on elsewhere and to continue the dialogue begun in 2008 with regional curators and critics.

River City  Biennale invites all professional artists, working or residing in the City of Wichita (no students, please), to submit images to be considered for the 2010 exhibit. To ensure the best possible and most professional presentation, RCB is a curated exhibition. This year’s curator, Hesse McGraw, curator at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, NE will initially review artists’ works via cd (images may be posted on RCB blog, too), then make studio visits in Wichita for a final selection. He will work with the selected artists to consider the sites available and the possibility of creating work that responds specifically to the exhibition spaces.

Submission guidelines and deadlines for the 2010 River City Biennale:

Please send or deliver to Project by August 15, 2009

• CD–up to 10 images of current work. Images should be approximately 600 x 900 pixels with a resolution of 300 pixels/inch

• Include image index with title of work, media, size and date completed in pdf format

• Include current resume/CV. Collaborative teams must submit individual   resumes/CV in pdf format

• Brief artist’s statement (no more than 250 words) in pdf format

• DVD (limit 10 minutes of material)

• For Web-based projects, please include URL address

Please label CD/DVD with your name, Emil address, other contact info (cell phone #, website address, etc.) Submitted materials will not be returned.

Project

1712 E. Douglas Ave.

Wichita, KS  67214

Artists selected for studio visits will be notified via e-mail in late-September. Please check the River City Blog  http://biennale2008.wordpress.com/ for updates and current information.

We are pleased to announce the curator for Wichita’s 2010 River City Biennale is Hesse McGraw.

Hesse McGraw is a curator, writer and artist working as curator at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska. He was the founding director and curator of Paragraph, a contemporary art gallery operating under the non-profit Urban Culture Project in downtown Kansas City, Missouri. He is the former assistant director of Max Protetch gallery in New York, City and former senior editor of Review, a Kansas City-based visual culture magazine. He has served as a lecturer in the Interdisciplinary department of the Kansas City Art Institute and frequently serves as a guest lecturer, critic and juror for fine art and architecture schools and organizations throughout the US.

Alongside producing two dozens exhibits and projects over three years at Paragraph, he has curated exhibitions for FLEX Self Storage (Topeka, Kansas), The New Genres Festival (Tulsa), The Stray Show (Chicago), Guild and Greyshkul (NYC), -scopeMiami, RARE (NYC), Rocket gallery (London) and White Flag Projects (St. Louis). He regularly contributes to publications including Art Papers, Dots & Quotes, Empty magazine, The Kansas City Star, RES, Review, Tank, and Ten by Ten. He has written exhibition essays for artists including Ryoji Ikeda, Tobias Wong, Steve Mumford, Eric von Robertson and many others.

Organized by gallery directors Ann Resnick (Project) and Elizabeth Stevenson (Fisch Haus), the 2nd River City Biennale is scheduled to open in the spring of 2010. The River City Biennale seeks to shift perceptions; locally, regionally and nationally, about art and artists in Wichita. Hesse McGraw has been asked to curate an exhibit that challenges notions of complacency in our region and to place the art of Wichita in a broader context–one that connects what’s going on here with what’s going on nationally, and even internationally, in the contemporary art world.

More information on RCB deadlines and how to submit images and proposals will be addressed in subsequent press releases.