Submission Details:
- Deadline for entry: Saturday, November 22, 2025; 11:19 PM EST
- Selection Notification: Saturday, December 6, 2025
- Installation dates: TBA
- Opening night: Friday, December 19; 6-9 PM Â
- Exhibition Closes: February 2026 (exact date TBA)
- Location: Fort Lauderdale, 1310 Gallery
Open to: All mediums 2D work such as paintings, mixed-media, collages, fiber, digital and photography. Interactive & installation pieces are highly considered.
*If you have poems and or short stories THAT FIT THE THEME, please consider a way to make them hang-ready and submit the work.
Select video works and sculptures will be considered.
ALL WORK MUST BE ORIGINAL WORK & HANG READYÂ
Fees
There is no mandatory fee to submit. However, a $20 suggested donation is encouraged to help offset exhibition and production costs. Donations can be made via https://givebutter.com/wye_soil Â
The submitted artwork should fit or complement the theme:
SOIL: Where the Light Enters
Artwork should explore ideas of transformation, healing, and rebirth — reflecting the ways we grow through what we go through. Submissions may interpret the theme through personal, cultural, emotional, or spiritual lenses, examining how experiences, memory, mindfulness, and resilience can become fertile ground for creativity, connection, and mental wellness.
Artwork should reflect an authentic lived experience or inner journey — touching on themes of vulnerability, truth-telling, healing, and personal or collective transformation.
We are especially drawn to work that reflects lived experience and personal transformation — not just visual beauty, but the emotional truth beneath it.
Think about:
- breaking open
- healing
- rebirth
- confronting the self
- shadow work
- identity
- memory
- resilience
- ancestral connection
- grounding
- emergence
- any part of a healing journey
Terms & Conditions
By submitting artwork, artists agree to the following:
- All submissions must be original work created by the artist.
- All work must be installation-ready (wired and framed, or otherwise suitable for display).
- Artists are responsible for delivery, installation, and pickup of their work.
- Digital artists must supply their own display equipment (e.g., monitor, cords, etc.).
- What’s Your Elephant™ and 1310 Gallery are not responsible for loss or damage to artworks.
- Selected artists grant permission for use of images for marketing and promotion of the exhibition.
About the Curator
Niki Lopez is an Afro-Latina, queer interdisciplinary visual artist, curator, and social practitioner based in South Florida. Her work blends visual storytelling, cultural symbolism, and social practice to create spaces for reflection, dialogue, and connection. Lopez is the founder of What’s Your Elephant™, a nonprofit arts and educational organization that uses creativity as a tool for healing and social change. For almost two decades, her projects often merge art, advocacy, and mindfulness, inviting communities to transform pain into purpose and vulnerability into power.
About What’s Your Elephant™
What’s Your Elephant™ is a 501(c)(3) arts and educational nonprofit that uses creativity to address the unspoken through art-making, dialogue, and mindfulness. Founded in 2014, the organization produces exhibitions, workshops, and creative activations that center awareness, empathy, mental health advocacy, and community connection.
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