Open Calls for Artists: How to Prepare a Strong Art Submission

What Are Open Calls for Artists?

An open call is a public invitation from an organisation — a gallery, museum, prize, festival, residency, magazine or curated project — asking artists to submit work for consideration. Unlike a private invitation or a gallery's existing roster, an open call is theoretically accessible to any artist who meets the stated criteria. In practice, the format varies widely. Some open calls for artists are juried exhibitions with a single show as the outcome. Others are awards, publication features, residency placements, commissioning opportunities or themed group shows.

In the UK, open call art submissions appear regularly across institutions such as the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the New Contemporaries, the John Moores Painting Prize, the Royal Society of British Artists and a long tail of artist-led spaces, regional galleries and independent prizes. London hosts a particularly dense concentration of artist open calls each year, but strong opportunities run across Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the English regions. Internationally, the picture is similar: a handful of well-known calls, surrounded by hundreds of smaller, more specialised opportunities.

What unites them is a structured submission process. You will be asked for artwork images, written information about the work, biographical and CV material, and — increasingly — an entry fee. Selection is usually made by a jury or curator working from your submission alone. They are unlikely to see your studio, your full body of work or your wider context. The submission is the artist for the purposes of that decision.

Why Artists Apply to Open Calls

It is worth being clear about why open calls matter, because the answer shapes how much time and care a submission deserves.

For early-career artists, open calls are one of the few routes into curated exhibitions without an existing gallery relationship. A selection, even in a modest show, becomes a line on the CV, a verifiable third-party endorsement and often the first piece of public exposure for a body of work.

For mid-career artists, open calls keep work circulating in front of curators, collectors and peers outside an established gallery context. They are a way to test new directions, reach new audiences and build the slow accumulation of credibility that supports gallery representation, residencies and grant applications.

For all artists, the discipline of preparing an artist submission is valuable in its own right. Writing about the work, selecting which pieces best represent a current direction, producing strong images and assembling a clean CV are skills that translate directly into gallery pitches, grant applications and direct collector approaches.

There are also realistic limits. Open calls are not a substitute for a long-term gallery relationship, a coherent practice or sustained collector development. A single selection rarely transforms a career. What an open call offers is opportunity, not outcome — and the value of that opportunity depends almost entirely on the quality of the submission.

How to Decide Whether an Open Call Is Worth Entering

Not every open call deserves an application. With entry fees common and preparation time significant, judgement matters as much as effort. A few questions to ask before you start:

Does the opportunity fit the work? A figurative oil painter does not belong in a digital-only photography prize. A sculptor working at five metres is unlikely to thrive in a small-works show. Read the brief carefully and look at previous selected work where it is published. If the curators have consistently chosen work very different from yours, the chance of selection is low regardless of quality.

Who is selecting? The jury or curator panel matters. A jury of recognised curators, museum directors or established artists carries more weight than an anonymous panel. Being shortlisted by named jurors is a credential in itself, and a named jury whose taste you can research is far easier to submit to with intention than an unnamed committee.

What is the real outcome? Some open calls deliver a physical exhibition in a respected venue. Others deliver a screen-only "online showcase" of limited value. Some offer prize money, acquisition, residency or curatorial introductions. Others offer only inclusion in a long list. Strip away the marketing language and ask what concretely a selected artist receives. Look at past editions: where did the exhibition actually take place, how was it documented, and what happened to the artists afterwards?

What is the entry fee versus the prize? A reasonable entry fee for a serious opportunity is normal — exhibitions cost money to mount. A high entry fee for a vague outcome, or a structure where the entry fees clearly exceed plausible prize and exhibition costs, deserves scepticism. Open call scams and low-value "pay to be published" schemes are common; treat any opportunity where the host's primary revenue is your entry fee as a warning sign. Vanity awards that ask for a further fee on selection, or that publish hundreds of "winners" each cycle, are best avoided.

What is the time cost? A strong application usually takes several focused hours, sometimes a day. If the opportunity is marginal, that time may be better spent on direct gallery approaches, studio practice or a single higher-quality submission elsewhere. It is consistently better to apply thoughtfully to three well-matched open calls in a quarter than to fire generic submissions at fifteen.

What does the small print say about your work? Some open calls require unseen or unexhibited work. Some retain the right to reproduce images for promotional purposes indefinitely. Some require selected artists to be available for installation, openings or talks. A small minority include unreasonable rights grabs in the terms and conditions. Read the entry terms before paying the fee, not after.

A simple test: would selection actually change something — a CV line you would mention to a gallery, a venue you would be proud to exhibit in, an audience you cannot otherwise reach? If the honest answer is no, the call is probably not worth entering.

What You Usually Need for an Art Submission

Submission requirements vary, but most open call art submissions ask for some combination of the following:

• Artwork images — typically 3–10 high-resolution images, sometimes more for sculpture or installation. Specifications vary: file size, format (JPEG, occasionally TIFF), pixel dimensions and naming conventions.
• Work details — title, year, medium, dimensions (height × width × depth), and often edition information for prints or photographs.
• An artist statement — usually 100–300 words, sometimes shorter. Some calls request a statement about the submitted work specifically; others ask for a broader statement of practice.
• A short biography — third-person, usually 100–200 words.
• An artist CV — selected exhibitions, education, awards, publications, collections, residencies.
• Contact and identification details — including, increasingly, evidence of right to work or live in a particular country for residencies.
• An entry fee — paid online at the point of submission.
• A submission form — often a single web form with character limits per field.

A reliable artist submission checklist for your own use is worth keeping. Most weak submissions are not weak because of the artwork: they are weak because something on this list was missing, late or below the required standard.

How to Choose Which Artwork to Submit

Choosing the work is the single most consequential decision in an open call submission. A few principles:

Submit the strongest work, not the newest. It is tempting to submit whatever just left the easel. Resist that. Submit work you would still defend in twelve months and that holds up against the strongest pieces in your back catalogue.

Read the brief and respond honestly. If the call is themed — a painting prize, a portrait prize, a landscape award, a particular medium — make sure the work genuinely fits. Selectors quickly tire of submissions that ignore the brief.

Submit a coherent group. Where multiple works are allowed, choose pieces that read as part of one body of work, not a scatter of unrelated experiments. A jury looking at three images forms a view of the artist as much as the individual works.

Avoid recent exposure where possible. If a work has already been heavily exhibited or published, a curator may prefer to programme something less seen. Where the call expects unseen work, respect that.

Be realistic about scale and shipping. If the venue cannot reasonably accommodate the work, or shipping would be prohibitive for a selected artist, the jury may quietly factor that in.

Preparing Artwork Images and Details

Image quality is the dominant variable in most open call decisions. Jurors usually see your work on a screen, often briefly, often alongside hundreds of other submissions. A poorly photographed strong painting is, in that context, a weak submission.

A few practical standards:

• Photograph squarely and in even, neutral light. Avoid raking studio light, mixed colour temperatures and visible reflections on glass or varnish. A simple set-up of two daylight-balanced sources at 45 degrees, with the camera level and parallel to the work, removes most common problems.
• Crop tightly to the work itself. Background floors, easels and tape are distracting and amateurish. The jury is looking at the work, not the studio.
• Colour-correct against the original. A red that reads orange on screen materially changes the work. A neutral grey card in the first frame of a shoot makes colour balancing in software straightforward.
• Match the required specifications exactly. If the call asks for 300 dpi, 3000 pixels on the long edge, sRGB JPEG under 5MB, deliver exactly that. Submissions are sometimes rejected administratively for file specifications alone.
• Name files clearly. Surname_Title_Year.jpg is almost always safer than IMG_4823.jpg. Where the call specifies a naming convention, follow it precisely.
• Include detail shots where allowed. For textured, layered or large work, a detail image can communicate what an overall shot cannot. One good full shot and one well-chosen detail is usually stronger than two competing wide shots.
• Keep the metadata accurate. Title, year, medium and dimensions should match exactly across the image filename, the submission form and your own records. Mismatches read as carelessness even when the work is strong.

For sculpture, installation and three-dimensional work, prepare more than one angle and include a sense of scale. A clean white-cube context, or a neutral studio backdrop, is almost always better than an in-situ shot with distracting surroundings. For time-based work, follow video specifications precisely, keep the running time within the requested limit, and provide a still image where requested.

It is worth treating documentation as part of the practice, not as a task you do the week of a deadline. Photograph each finished work properly once, store the master files at archive resolution, and keep a current export in the format most open calls expect. Done that way, preparing images for a specific submission becomes a matter of selecting from a tidy archive rather than re-shooting under pressure.

The discipline here is the same as preparing work for a gallery website or a collector record: accurate, high-quality documentation is part of being a working artist, not a one-off task per submission. For a deeper walkthrough, see How to Photograph Artwork.

Writing an Artist Statement for an Open Call

An artist statement for an open call is not a general statement of practice tipped into a form. It is a focused, readable piece of writing that helps a jury place the submitted work.

A useful structure:

1. One or two sentences naming what the work is and what it engages with. Subject, medium, central concern.
2. One or two sentences on approach. How the work is made, why those choices matter, what the work tries to hold open.
3. Where relevant, one sentence connecting the submitted works to a wider body of practice.

Avoid jargon, false modesty and overstatement. Avoid biographical material — that belongs in the bio and CV. Avoid quoting theorists unless directly relevant. Read the statement aloud; if it sounds like a press release written by someone else, rewrite it.

If the call requests a statement about the submitted work specifically, write about those works, not the practice in general. A statement that could describe any of your last ten paintings is rarely a strong one.

For a fuller treatment, see How to Write an Artist Statement.

Artist CVs, Biographies and Supporting Information

A clean, accurate, professionally structured CV is a credential in itself. A messy, padded or inconsistent CV undermines even strong work.

Keep these principles in mind:

• Reverse chronological order within each section.
• Standard sections: Education, Solo Exhibitions, Group Exhibitions (often split Selected / Other), Awards & Prizes, Residencies, Publications, Collections, Commissions, Teaching.
• Consistent formatting. Year, title (italicised), venue, city. Do not mix formats between entries.
• No padding. Do not list every group show from a community space alongside a museum exhibition. Selective is stronger than exhaustive.
• Tell the truth precisely. "Shortlisted" is not "Selected". A two-person show is not a solo. Inflated CVs are caught and remembered.

A short third-person biography (100–200 words) should sit alongside the CV. Keep it factual: where you trained, where you work, the broad terrain of the practice, two or three significant credentials. Avoid sweeping interpretive language; the bio is not an essay.

For a step-by-step approach, see Artist CV and Biography.

Common Mistakes in Artist Submissions

Patterns recur across rejected submissions:

• Poor images — bad lighting, visible studio clutter, distorted colour, low resolution, glare on varnish.
• Generic artist statements — written once and reused everywhere, with no specific relationship to the submitted work or the call.
• Inflated or messy CVs — exaggerated credits, inconsistent formatting, missing dates, every entry treated as equally important.
• Ignoring the brief — submitting work that does not fit the theme, medium, scale or stage-of-career criteria.
• Incomplete information — missing dimensions, missing year, missing medium, missing edition number.
• Last-minute submissions — applications rushed in the final hour show, particularly in the writing.
• Volume over focus — submitting to every open call regardless of fit, on the assumption that quantity compensates for selectivity. It rarely does.
• No tracking system — losing track of what was submitted where, missing notification dates, double-submitting works that have been promised exclusively elsewhere.

Most of these are simple to fix once recognised. A serious artist submission checklist, used every time, removes most of them at source.

How to Track Open Calls, Deadlines and Outcomes

A working artist applying to open calls regularly needs a system. Memory is not a system.

A minimum tracking record per open call:

• Opportunity name and host organisation
• Type (exhibition, prize, residency, publication)
• Country and venue
• Entry fee
• Submission deadline
• Notification date
• Works submitted (titles and image versions)
• Statement and CV version submitted
• Outcome (selected, shortlisted, declined, no response)
• Notes for next time

A simple spreadsheet is sufficient to start with. The point is to be able to see, at any moment, what is outstanding, what has been declined, what has been selected and which works are currently committed to other applications. This matters because some open calls require unseen or unexhibited work, and some require that a submitted work is available for the full exhibition window — which conflicts with selling it or showing it elsewhere in the interim.

It also helps to track the operational layer alongside the editorial one: the date the entry fee was paid, the confirmation reference, any login or portal account used, and any uploaded files. Open call portals occasionally lose submissions or fail to send notifications; a clear record on your side is the only reliable evidence that an application was made and accepted.

Tracking outcomes gives you information. After a year or two, patterns emerge: which kinds of opportunities select your work, which do not, which jurors have responded, which are worth the entry fee, which are not. That information shapes the next year of applications — and is itself a quiet form of professional development that artists who only apply ad hoc never accumulate. A short post-submission note to yourself ("statement felt too general", "images B and C were stronger than A", "this curator favoured figurative work in the previous edition") is more useful six months later than memory.

For UK artists specifically, useful sources for finding open calls include Arts Council England's funding pages, a-n The Artists Information Company, Artists Newsletter, CuratorSpace, Art Rabbit and the open call listings of major institutions. Treat aggregator listings critically: presence on a listing is not endorsement.

How Vault Canvas Helps Artists Prepare Better Submissions

Vault Canvas is an artist archive system built around the working reality of preparing submissions, exhibitions and gallery approaches. Several parts of the system are directly useful for open call work, all on the same principle: keep the material an open call asks for — artwork images, dimensions, medium, dates, statements, CVs, deadlines, submission notes and outcomes — organised in one place rather than scattered across folders, drives and inboxes.

In practice that means:

• A structured artwork archive that holds high-resolution images, accurate dimensions, medium, year, edition information, location and exhibition history for every work. When a call asks for a 3000-pixel sRGB JPEG with a specific file name, the master image and the metadata it needs are already there to export from.
• Reusable artist statements, biographies and CVs maintained centrally and version-controlled, so the statement you sent to a prize last month is easy to find, edit and tailor — not rewritten from scratch every time. CVs stay current automatically as new exhibitions and credits are added.
• Exhibition, provenance and sales records that keep an accurate, current CV without the manual work of rebuilding it each time, and that make it straightforward to answer questions like "has this work been exhibited before?" or "is it currently committed elsewhere?"
• A submission log in your own records: which works were sent where, with which statement and CV version, with the deadline, the notification date and the outcome — so the next round of applications builds on the last.
• A portfolio you can share with curators and juries beyond a single submission form. When an open call leads to a longer conversation, a clean shareable portfolio is the difference between a follow-up and a missed opening.

The point is not to make submissions feel automated. It is to remove the friction that causes good artists to miss deadlines, submit the wrong image, or send a statement that does not quite match the work. Once the underlying archive is in good order, preparing an open call submission becomes a matter of selecting, tailoring and sending — not assembling under pressure.

For a wider view of how a structured archive supports submissions and gallery approaches, see How to Create an Artist Portfolio and How to Get Your Art Into a Gallery.

Open Call Submission Checklist

Before submitting, run through the following:

• The work fits the brief, theme and medium of the call.
• The jury and outcome justify the entry fee and time cost.
• All required images are at the correct resolution, format and file size.
• Files are named clearly and consistently.
• Each work has accurate title, year, medium and dimensions.
• The artist statement is written for this call, not pasted from elsewhere.
• The CV is current, consistent and selective.
• The biography is current, third-person and factual.
• Character and word limits are respected.
• Contact details are correct.
• Entry fee has been paid and confirmation received.
• The submission is logged in your tracking system with deadline and notification date.

A checklist used once is a checklist; a checklist used every time is a process.