The Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans is pleased to invite contemporary visual artists to submit to the 2016 Open Call for Submissions. Artists who live, show work, or have held an artist residency (during the 2015 calendar year) in New Orleans or the surrounding region (within 200 miles of New Orleans city limits) are eligible to apply.

Please review Important Dates and Eligibility & General Guidelines before entering your submission.

Note: There are two sections for submissions. The first section is for CAC Members Only. The second section is for Non-CAC Members. Please be sure to submit to your appropriate section.

In 1974, roughly two years before the founding of the CAC, the artist Gordon Matta-Clark, together with a group of artists including some native to Southeastern Louisiana, coined the term Anarchitecture. A word used to title an exhibition, to describe a form of thinking, to bind a community of friends and artists, and to acknowledge space as a social and formal condition, Anarchitecture pointed to an interdisciplinary spirit of the times that helped usher in contemporary arts centers across the country, and significantly, here in New Orleans.

As we begin our commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the CAC, this exhibition also serves as a formal meditation on the concept of Anarchitecture, an elision of the words architecture and anarchy. We invite work that explores:

—The relationship between spatial and social conditions

—The relationship between urban and aesthetic development

—The function of language as a mirror to aesthetic models

—The reading of history through detritus

—The paradox of construction through destruction

The organization of the Contemporary Arts Center at 900 Camp Street, in the former Katz and Besthoff offices and warehouses, serves as a demonstration of creative reuse and the power of space to articulate an image of the future. We invite artists in this open call to similarly imagine the next forty years of the CAC through the reinvention of historic forms and structures.

“Methods of Occupation (A term of transforming space to suit one’s needs)

By Superimposition

By Envelopment

By Consumption

By Digestion”

“A response to cosmetic design

Completion through removal

Completion through collapse

Completion in emptiness”

“A Building With A View”

—Gordon Matta-Clark, excerpts from his Art Cards