What is Apexart?

Apexart is a non-profit arts organisation in Lower Manhattan founded in 1994. We offer opportunities to curators and emerging and established artists, while challenging set ideas about culture, art, exhibitions, and curation through our exhibitions, Fellowships, publications, and public programs.

Make voting in apexart’s open call part of your class curriculum

The apexart open call occurs twice annually soliciting idea-driven, group exhibition proposals from everyone, anywhere. Proposals must be 500 words or less, in English (Google translate works well) and contain no images, links, videos, or CVs so that jurors can focus on the idea only. The NYC open call is for NYC exhibitions while the international open call is for exhibitions proposed anywhere in the world other than NYC.

The jury is composed of approximately 400 individuals and arts-related classes from around the world using an online crowdsourcing system. Each juror votes on a subset of anonymous and randomized proposals. Our signature selection process results in exhibitions that reflect the interests and sensibilities of our international audiences, while allowing artists and curators from locations that don’t get their due attention to compete on a fair playing field.

How you, your university class, or your high school class can participate
As an individual, contact us at juror@apexart.org. To involve your class as an assignment or an elective, you can specify the number of proposals that students review for credit—generally 20–50, and take advantage of our lesson plans for subsequent discussion. It takes about 2 hours to read and rate 50 proposals. Each juror is given an individual login and password, rating each proposal on a scale of 1 (uninteresting)–5 (I’d like to see it). At its conclusion, the process generates more than 16,000 votes on 450–500 submissions.

Classroom benefits
As apexart jurors, students review ideas coming from all around the world and actually help determine apexart’s exhibition programming—while gaining a real-world perspective of issues evaluating proposals, and considering what makes one compelling and another less so. Our last open call drew proposals and jurors from 89 countries. Being on the other side of the “grading” process is essential to one’s own understanding of the curatorial process and the jury process in general, and sparks dynamic classroom discussion about what art is, what’s important to individuals and what art’s role and purpose can be. The variety of proposals provides valuable insight into the themes, conditions, history, and ideas that are pressing in local and international contexts.

Sign up
Provide names and email addresses of participating students for direct email, or let us know the number of students to make logins for, if you wish to not have them on our mailing list. Tell us the parameters of the process that work best for you, including the number of proposals to be assigned, and any specific calendar restraints. You can send this information to lisa.vagnoni@apexart.org. We will send login information, voting instructions, and deadline reminders to you and your students. We provide you with a live tally page that will show the number of votes logged by your students, the ratings for each proposal given by each student, a copy of the proposal, the order of its ranking as determined by all jurors, and the last time each student logged in.

Educators find that serving on an apexart jury encourages lively discussion about many aspects of curating, writing, and exhibition organization including size, location, purpose, and feasibility. To date, more than 120 classes from universities and art schools have participated, including The New School (New York City), Node Center for Curatorial Studies (Berlin), Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, de Appel Curatorial Program (Amsterdam), Makere University (Kampala), and MICA (Baltimore).

In recognition of their effort, we offer a free e-book of one of apexart’s relevant and readable publications to all student jurors.

More information on the program and how to sign up can be found here. Contact: Lisa Vagnoni, Web Director—lisa.vagnoni@apexart.org.