Open Call: Five Year Anniversary Group Show
Pushing the Frame: Willful Transgressions
As Westlab + Gallery crosses five years of operation, we want to celebrate this milestone by inviting our community near and far to submit artwork for a group exhibition opening in February 2026.
Five years after our founding, we are collectively witness to a neighborhood ever resilient, yet invariably impacted by the increasingly oppressive politics of our time, which continue to intrude into all of our daily lives. ICE looms as a continued threat against our neighbors; over-policing persists in our parks, grocery stores, and subway stations; the rights and safety of our trans and nonbinary peers are perpetually and viciously attacked; funding for arts and cultural institutions is being slashed. And yet we must find ways to resist —
And so, we invite artists to submit work for the group exhibition, Pushing the Frame: Willful Transgressions. This exhibition welcomes artworks across media that enact resistance through experimentation, manifest a transgressive spirit, reorient or reimagine the contemporary body politic, and so on. These interventions may be deeply personal or they may be macroscopic, they may be abstract or they may be very direct. We are open to all interpretations of the brushstrokes that emanate from the feeling of Pushing the Frame.
From the beginning, our exhibition programming has prioritized underrepresented voices in the arts, particularly those of our BIPOC and LGBTQ+ neighbors who outline the margins and constantly redefine the interior of our community. We especially encourage artists from these backgrounds to apply. Please see our previous exhibitions here.
Submission Guidelines
Submission: You may submit up to 3 completed artworks for consideration.
Eligibility: Artists at any stage of their career, near or far, are encouraged to apply.
Mediums & Size: We will consider all mediums and styles, up to a reasonable scale.
Submission Fee: The submission fee is $10. We can offer a fee waiver based on need. Please email gallery@westlab.nyc to request.
Deadline to apply: Monday, January 19, 2026
**All artists who submit work will also be considered for a solo exhibition in the future.
**Please feel welcome to contact us with any questions! Email gallery@westlab.nyc or stop by in person: 131 Irving Avenue, Brooklyn, NY
Exhibition Details
This group exhibition will be on view at Westlab + Gallery in Bushwick from February 22 — April 19, 2026. The opening reception will take place on Sunday, February 22nd from 6pm to 9pm.
Selected artists will be responsible for the delivery and pick-up of their artwork to and from the gallery. We will coordinate these logistics directly with each selected artist.
We request that artwork be installation-ready and delivered to the gallery by February 10, 2026.
All featured artwork will be available for sale, unless otherwise requested by the artist.
When formulating the theme for this open call, we looked towards the critical voices of women of color to guide us. We invite you to consider the following as you prepare your submission:
bell hooks, Art on My Mind
“Recently, at the end of a lecture on art and aesthetics at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, I was asked whether I thought art mattered, if it really made a difference in our lives. From my own experience, I could testify to the transformative power of art. I asked my audience to consider why in so many instances of global imperialist conquest by the West, art has been either appropriated or destroyed. I shared my amazement at all the African art I first saw years ago in the museums and galleries of Paris. It occurred to me then that if one could make a people lose touch with their capacity to create, lose sight of their will and their power to make art, then the work of subjugation, of colonization, is complete. Such work can be undone only by acts of concrete reclamation.”
Trinh T. Minh-ha , When the Moon Waxes Red
“Liberation opens up new relationships of power, which have to be controlled by practices of liberty. Displacement involves the invention of new forms of subjectivities, of pleasures, of intensities, of relations, which also implies the continuous renewal of a critical work that looks carefully and intensively at the very system of values to which one refers in fabricating the tools of resistance.”