OPEN CALL: Music of Many Colours: Art, Music, and the Cultural Imaginary
Submission Deadline: October 7, 2025
Exhibition on view: November 7 to December 7, 2025
The Local NY, Long Island City
This exhibition brings together artists exploring the enduring relationship between music and cultural identity. Across traditions and generations, music serves as both archive and amplifier—carrying ancestral memory, voicing resistance, and shaping collective belonging. The works presented here have a broad range of references connected to personal experience, memories, specific albums, songs, genres, subcultures and performances through which identities are shaped, contested, celebrated, and reimagined.
The title Music of Many Colours takes its name from a collaborative album by Nigerian musician and political activist Fela Aníkúlápó Kútì and American jazz-funk pioneer Roy Ayers. Fela stands out globally as the influential innovator of Afro-beat who used his music to speak truth to power.
By exploring the intersections of auditory and visual form, the artists foreground the ways music transcends language and borders while remaining rooted in lived experience. From references to folk traditions and diasporic soundscapes to reinterpretations of contemporary popular culture, these works invite viewers to consider how music shapes personal and communal narratives.
Guest Juror: Sadaf Padder
We are thrilled to be working with Sadaf Padder, an independent curator, art advisor, and certified educator whose work explores climate change, neo-mythology, and diasporic connections. She has curated projects nationwide—from Philadelphia to Los Angeles to Martha’s Vineyard—and her exhibitions have been featured in LA Weekly, Hyperallergic, and ArtNews. Her writing services have supported over 100 artists in securing awards such as the Fulbright, Jerome Hill Fellowship, and Brooklyn Arts Council Grant.
With a background as a public school educator and administrator, Padder develops youth arts programs and internships alongside her curatorial practice. Her projects have led to acquisitions of BIPOC women artists by institutions including the Baltimore Museum of Art, RISD Museum, Northwestern University, and the Nion McEvoy Foundation.
She has contributed to Visual Aids, ARTSY, Up Mag, and Hyperallergic, and is a 2022–23 Emily J. Hall Tremaine Fellow. Padder also serves on the boards of the Vera List Center and 12 Gates Arts.
How to Apply:
We will consider audio and visual media. Physical objects must be able to hang on a wall or be suspended. Because the exhibition is in a mixed-use space, free-standing artwork cannot be considered. Artists may submit as many pieces as they wish for consideration.
There is no submission fee. Artwork will be delivered ‘ready to hang’ by the artists or their agents and picked up on the installation and deinstallation dates.
Exact dates for installation, reception, and special performances and events will be announced in early October.
