Baseball cards: portrait miniatures, the American way.

Poets The New England Poetry Club is accepting poems for its annual contests, which offer a range of monetary prizes. Learn more.
Deadline: May 31, 2012

Short fiction writers University of Georgia Press is accepting short fiction collections for the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Awards – annual $1,000 prize and publication by UGA Press. Learn more.
Deadline: June 1, 2012

Call to Artists, Writers, Musicians, Filmmakers  Gallery X in New Bedford is currently accepting entries for their exhibition Q@X4: Do Ask, Do Tell. Submissions may include 2D, 3D Media, Music, Film, Video, Literature, Poetry. Learn more.
Deadline: June 3, 2012

New England Filmmakers The LEF Moving Image Fund Pre-production fund will grant up to 7 awards of $5,000 each to projects in the pre-production stage. Applicants are strongly encouraged to contact LEF Program Director Sara Archambault  with details about the project prior to submitting a proposal. Learn more.
Deadline: June 8,  2012 (5:00pm)

Artists/Designers The Creative Arts Program at Boston Children’s Hospital invites artists/designers experienced with durable wall-based art to forward qualifications for the new Main Building addition at 57 Binney Street, slated to open in summer 2013. Budget: $20,000 per floor, with an overall, all-inclusive budget of $100,000. Finalists will receive a $1,500 proposal development fee. Learn more.
Deadline: June 22, 2012

Dance Residency The Boston Center for the Arts call for applications for the 2012-2013 season of the Dance Residency program. This season includes two 5 week residencies that may include two weekends of performances. Learn more or email with questions.
Deadline: June 29, 2012

GBLT Film/Video The Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival is seeking compelling films and videos by, for or about the GLBT community in the following categories: Feature (60 minutes or longer), Documentary (any length), Men’s Short (under 60 minutes), Women’s Short (under 60 minutes), and Transgender Film. Learn more or email with questions.
Deadline: June 30, 2012

Call for Works Soundcrawl welcomes new media submissions from composers, video artists, sound engineers, sound artists & tinkerers from every corner of the world. If it’s adventurous, beautiful, artistic and “plugs in.” they’d love to hear it! Video works, installation art and live performances are also welcome. Length: 15 minutes or less. They accept anything in a fixed digital file. Learn more.
Deadline: September 1, 2012

Image credit: Baseball Card from the Benjamin K. Edwards Collection. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, DIGITAL ID (original) bbc 1851

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At Available Potential Enterprizes, Ltd. in Northampton, 20 artists from Zea Mays Printmaking studio will exhibit in Scale in Contemporary Printmaking, which has its opening reception this Friday, May 11, 2012.

One of those artists, Annie Bissett, will be on-hand at the opening. And she’ll be making money.

Her contribution to the show will include selections from Loaded, a series exploring currency and economics, and she’ll be printing a currency of her own creation at the opening reception.

Here, Annie puts in her two cents on art, money, and more.

So… how do you make money as an artist?
That’s the $64,000 question. Until about 6 years ago I was a commercial artist/illustrator and I made good money, but earning a living as a fine artist isn’t so easy. In the 1990s I could sell a fancy pie chart that took me an hour to make for $400, so I’ve been shocked to discover that it’s hard to find a buyer who will pay $400 for a woodblock print that takes me 6 weeks to complete. As part of my recent series of prints about money, called Loaded, I decided to design a currency to celebrate the parts of our economy that are undervalued or ignored in our calculations about value and worth – things that we rely on for life itself that are free and priceless and belong to everyone. There are no numbers on my currency because things like air or water or community can’t be counted.

Why Loaded (the project)? Why Loaded (the title)?
I tend to make work about things that bother or puzzle me, so between the economics of my own shift from commercial to fine art and the so-called global economic crisis, the topic of money was looming. I struggled with how to tackle it until I got the idea to isolate small sections from a $1 bill, blow them up very large, and use them as jumping off points for composing some large format prints. Once I got started there was plenty of material to keep me going. As for the title, I was an English major in college, so I often start with a word or phrase in my art making process. I liked the word loaded for its multiple meanings: wealthy, charged with meaning, bearing a heavy burden, armed and ready to fire.

What’s the most surprising response to your art you’ve ever received?
Before Loaded I did a series about the early settlers of Massachusetts which includes a lot of references to the Mayflower. Every time I show those prints at least one person will approach me and discreetly reveal to me that they’re a Mayflower descendant. It has a very confessional quality, sort of like a gay person coming out of the closet. It surprised me initially, but I’ve come to feel that receiving those confessions is part of the work.

What’s next?
I have more to do in the Loaded series, including a group of works that examine cliches which use the same metaphor for both ends of the economic spectrum, like “filthy rich” and “dirt poor.” Then I hope to move on to something new. I’d like to make a block-printed book.

Scale in Contemporary Printmaking runs at APE in Northampton May 8-31.

Images: recent work by Annie Bissett. All images courtesy of the artist.

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The Boston Public Library and Mixit Print Studio have joined forces to present reThink Ink, a visual tour de force printmaking exhibition. The show includes work created over the last 25 years from prominent Boston area printmakers. The exhibition has a total of 71 artists whose work includes everything from hand-held miniatures to fully sculptural, multi-media installations. If you’re into printmaking, this is great opportunity to see the work of many creative minds.

reThink Ink exhibition runs till July 31, 2012
Boston Public Library, Copley Square, 700 Boylston Street
Changing Exhibitions Space, McKim Building 1st floor
Wiggin Gallery, McKim Building, 3rd floor
Johnson Building Lobby

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Call for Large Sculpture The Cotuit Center for the Arts is accepting submissions for interior and exterior three dimensional work to be displayed in their art galleries. The upper gallery of the theater features 60 linear feet of space dedicated to sculpture, pottery and other work which may be displayed on pedestals. These interior shows rotate approximately every 5-10 weeks. The Center also seeks work to be displayed on a long-term basis on the exterior grounds of the Center’s campus. All work, inside and out, may be offered for sale under the standard terms of the gallery. Any artists interested in being considered by the Center’s curatorial committee for a solo or group invitational show should submit inquiries and website links to gallery@cotuitcenterforthearts.org.

Call to Artists The 5th Annual Naukabout Music Festival is seeking local artists to exhibit at the festival at the Barnstable County Fairgrounds on August 11, 2012. There is a large artist space lined up with opportunities to showcase work on the main performance stage and set up a plein air studio and participate in a live auction during the event. Learn more. Questions:  littlebeachgallery@gmail.com.

Playwrights/Directors Applications are now being accepted for the 15th Annual Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, designed to fosters collaboration between early-career writers and directors in the beginning stages of the creative process. Writers and directors are paired to create a new play from scratch, culminating in a public reading series. Learn more.
Deadline: May 14, 2012

Photographers Applications are now being accepted for the Aaron Siskin Foundation’s 2012 Individual Photographer’s Fellowship. Learn more.
Deadline: May 18, 2012

Visual Artists Applications are now being accepted for the annual Visual Arts Sea Grant of Rhode Island. New England professional visual artists to address the issue of the environment of the ocean and its coastal communities. Grants are intended to financially assist individuals and/or collaborating artists whose works are related to themes of the marine environment. Curatorial proposals will be considered.  Learn more.
Deadline: May 25, 2012

LGBTQ Film Long Beach Q Film Festival (September 14-16, 2011, Long Beach, CA)  is currently seeking films with LGBTQ themes, depicting LGBTQ characters and community. Learn more. Questions: holly@hollylight.com
Deadline: June 8, 2012

Photographers Open to Interpretation is now calling on photographers to submit images for consideration in a juried book competition called Fading Light.The juror is George Slade, Principal at re: photographica. Learn more.
Deadline: June 26, 2012

Dance Films The Dance Films Association is now accepting applications for a Post-Production Grant up to $2,500. Learn more. Contact Brighid Greene brighid@dancefilms.org for access to the application.
Deadline: July 1, 2012

Women Screenwriters/Directors  The Broad Humor Film Festival (September 27-30, 2012, Venice, CA)  is now accepting entries either written or directed by a woman, and the subject matter must include “a healthy dose of humor.” Categories include: Feature Narrative and Documentary (over 60 minutes), Short Narrative and Documentary (under 60 minutes), Feature Screenplay (75-115 pages), and Short Screenplay (under 35 pages). Learn more. Questions: info@broadhumor.com
Deadline: July 14, 2012

Poets The annual American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize is now accepting entries. Winner receives publication of a book of poems, a $3,000 award, and distribution by Copper Canyon Press through Consortium. Learn more.
Deadline: October 31, 2012

Image credit: Enjoy Don’t Destroy poster showing two children picking flowers. Ohio : Federal Art Project, 1936 or 1937. Reproduction Number: LC-USZC2-5651 (color film copy slide)

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Lucien Castaing-Taylor (Film & Video ’11) and Nicky Tavares (Film & Video ’11) both received awards from the LEF Foundation’s Spring 2012 Moving Image Fund.

Janet Echelman (Crafts and Sculpture/Installation ’09) and Nathalie Miebach (Sculpture/Installation ’09) were both nominated as “Women to Watch” by the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Sandra Allen (Drawing ’08) is in Bridging Earth and Sky (trees rendered in art) at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (thru 6/8).

Martha Jane Bradford‘s (Drawing ’85) art was featured in a virtual, Second Life exhibition called Acquarella: After the Apocalypse (Chapters 1 & 2) in April.

Candice Smith Corby (Painting ’08) opens the solo show Fortified at Ellen Miller Gallery (5/11-6/9). Also, read about Candice’s curatorial project, Self/Fabricated.

Vico Fabbris (Painting ’06) was selected as a mentor for the Art Institute of Boston Master in Fine Arts in the Visual Arts program.

Eric Hofbauer (Music Comp. ’09), whose American Grace crowdfunding campaign is on IndieGoGo, was featured in the Boston Globe.

Jesse Kreitzer‘s (Film & Video Finalist ’09) documentary The Restoration Project screens at the Cannes Film Festival Short Film Corner this month. Also, his TV pilot The Folklorist recently premiered and received two New England Emmy Award nominations for its explorations of the Boston Molasses Flood, the Boston Massacre, and more.

Tara Masih (Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Finalist ’96) is the editor of The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays, which is published this month and recently won a 2012 Skipping Stones Honor Award.

Rania Matar‘s (Photography ’11) A Girl in Her Room is published by Umbrage Editions this month – and it’s been featured in Marie Claire, the Huffington Post, CNN photo blog, and elswhere!

Richard Raiselis‘s (Painting ’12) exhibition Facing Music is at Gallery NAGA (5/4-5/26).

The German version of Eric Henry Sanders‘s (Playwriting ’09) play Reservoir transferred from Theatre89 in Berlin to the Mainzer-Kammerspiele in Mainz for a guest run. Also, Eric’s short play “Indebted” was part of Debt at Drilling Company in NYC.

Peter Snoad (Playwriting ’09) was awarded a writing residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He’ll spend the time working on a new multi-media play, The Draft, about the impact of the Vietnam War draft.

Stephen Tourlentes‘s (Photography ’11) solo show at Carroll and Sons, Of Lengths and Measures, got a great review in the Boston Globe.

Media work by Jeff Warmouth (Sculpture/Installation Finalist ’05) will again be lit large on the Mass. Convention Center Authority’s LED marquee, care of Boston Cyberarts.

Read past Fellows Notes. If you’re a past fellow/finalist with news, let us know.

Image: Sandra Allen, QUIESCENCE (2004) pencil on paper 72×32 in.

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We’ve been exploring issues artists encounter in their work, and we recently asked a variety of artists: How do you choose your titles?

In part two of the same discussion, a wider picture starts to emerge of how titles function in different artistic disciplines.

Deborah Abel, choreographer
Usually the title for my choreography offers the only words I will be using to convey my intention to the viewer. I use the title to unfold layers of meaning that will speak differently to different individuals, and to introduce the spiritual/philosophical truths I want to share and explore. With just a few words I want it to create questions and images that the audience will bring with them to the performance (and entice them to attend). The process of searching for a title can take weeks if not months. It’s is a part of the creation that I enjoy immensely .In my most recent concert Calling to You: A Tale of Ancient Wisdom in the Modern World, the basis for the concert was a story that included a parable from ancient India. For months we called it the “India concert” for lack of another title. I read through Rumi poems and took notes on many different lines. I found that one jumped out from the list: “Standing on the bank calling to you.” I was drawn to the mystery of who is calling to whom and the layers of meaning in the line: earthly and divine love, personal love and universal all calling to you.

In The Beauty Road, our concert about the power of community, we were working on a “wedding scene.” For the title we looked for synonyms for “witnessing,” and found The Beholding, a perfect title, we thought, for the event itself and the community’s role as those beholding and making real this love for the couple.

Michael Teig, poet
“How do you choose your titles?” The short answer is I don’t know. Good titles are a kind of seduction (Or sometimes, like any seduction, they just seem good at the moment). Some titles start as lines and then migrate up or often to a completely different poem. I choose titles while a movie or a song or a friend is talking and I drift off over a phrase they’ve said. Some start out as common expressions or instructions or simply images I’ve been carrying around.

Another answer is I steal them. Some come from songs (Snatch it Back and Hold It), some from books I haven’t read (Au Bonheur des Ogres was on the shelf at my then girlfriend’s house), and some from ridiculous jobs I’ve had (Directory of Obsolete Securities exists – I used it to research a web-based game about Wall Street). I choose titles from things I’ve thought or heard or misheard or thought I’ve thought. I put them in cold storage: notebooks where they wait. I write them on receipts or say them into my phone like a detective on TV. I pull the car over when my son says something I’ll need to use later. A good title is a very short poem by itself. And in that respect you can think things with a title that you can’t think anywhere else.

Carrie Gustafson, glass artist
It’s really important to title the pieces, as a title provides a reference for the viewer and a window into what the piece meant to me when I was making it. The pieces which have “Bottle” or “Bowl” in the name are often called that so the gallery knows what piece I am referring to! Or (as in the case of my thistle bottles) it signals a form or pattern that I repeat, as opposed to a title like Caju, which is a one of a kind work.

Richard Raiselis, painter
Titles are a good way to remember paintings when they are no longer in the studio. I choose titles largely for my own amusement, and so that I can visualize my picture when friends tell me that they saw one. My paintings on the MCC website include Thelonica, Prelude, Toots Teal Man, and Eighty-Eight. These titles all refer to jazz – music that I play and enjoy listening to. Sometimes my wire pictures look like musical scores, or like heads; in jazz the head is the melody played before improvisation. (Read more about how Richard selected these titles.)

In each case, the title post-dates the picture. I may joke around with possible titles as I paint, but I don’t think that my word games influence my formal choices as I work.

Facing Music, an exhibition of work by Richard Raiselis, opens at Gallery NAGA on May 4, and runs through May 26, 2012.

Images: still image from CALLING TO YOU, choreographed by Deborah Abel, photo by Liza Voll; Richard Raiselis, EIGHTY-EIGHT (2011) oil on linen 40×40 in.

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It’s Spring, and to us that means it’s time to open wide your eyes and place them in front of work by a local artist – such as one of the many artists taking part in Open Studios throughout the Commonwealth.

And if you ARE an artist: we asked a few individuals who are about to open up their creative workspaces, What’s the most important thing to keep in mind as you’re preparing for your open studios?

Nick Ward, Distillery Boston, June 3
I think that a lot of people would default to advice about being sure to present work nicely, have work that is ready to buy and hang, using good lighting on the work and having a price list handy, but I always try to focus on a more basic element of opening my studio up to the world. I try to prepare to make hundreds of people feel comfortable in my private space. People are, after all, coming to meet artists and see art in a relaxed environment, and so often they are met with awkward small talk or – even worse, artists who pay them no attention at all. I always find the idea of opening my studio space to the world stressful, so I try to plan for all sorts of different visitors. I try to be ready to chat with those who are interested, to know who wants some space to look without interruption, and to be sure to approach and welcome everyone that comes through my door. Seems simple but I have found that so many artists miss the mark and make visitors feel less than comfortable.

Rachel Mello, Mad Oyster Studios, May 4-6
Be Open! Open Studios offer great opportunities, for showing your work, hearing feedback, meeting people in your community and artists from other communities, and so much more. If you stay open to all the many ways you can enjoy and benefit from Open Studios, you’ll have a great time. If you narrow your focus down on only one thing – whether you make sales, or whether you get a gallerist interested in your work, or whatever it is you’re hoping for – you risk missing other great opportunities and interactions.

I find it helps to think of Open Studios like Opening Day of the baseball season. Yes, it’s always nice to win your home opener, but whether or not you do does not decide what happens for the rest of the season. I’ve had people call me back two weeks after Somerville Open Studios to say they couldn’t get a certain piece out of their mind, and they want to come back and buy it. I’ve gotten group show invitations from galleries months after SOS passed. They had walked around, taken notes, and called me when they needed someone. I might have said it was a flat year, only to learn later that great things were happening I didn’t know about. Be friendly and nice and polite to everyone. And then, when it’s over, enjoy the fact that your studio is clean for a few weeks!

Colleen Kiely, Vernon Street Studios, May 5-6
Keep in mind that many visitors may feel a bit intimidated looking at art, so make an effort to greet every visitor warmly and make them feel welcome in your studio.

Here are upcoming open studios events in the next few weeks (and let us know if yours isn’t on the list). And find more at the Mass. Office of Travel and Tourism’s Open Studios page.

Somerville Open Studios (May 4-6, 2012)
Potters Place Spring Show and Sale in Walpole (May 4-6, 2012)
Brookline Artists’ Open Studios (May 5-6, 2012)
Needham Open Studios (May 5-6, 2012)
SoWa Art Walk (May 6, 2012)
Fort Point Arts Community (May 11-13, 2012)
Cambridge Open Studios (COS East/Central, May 12-13; North/West, 19-20, 2012)
East Boston Open Studios (May 19-20, 2012)
Lexington Open Studios (May 19-20, 2012)
Newton Open Studios (May 19-20, 2012)
Dedham Open Studios (May 20, 2012)
The Distillery and King Terminal in South Boston (June 3, 2012)
Studios at Porter Mill in Beverly (June 16, 2012)
Ongoing: Western Avenue Studios, Lowell (every first Sat.), AHA! New Bedford (every second Thurs.),

Images: Nick Ward, PORTRAIT OF MARGAUX WITH MORNING HAIR (2011), Oil on board, 48×48 in; Rachel Mello, KNOWING WHEN (front), THE SECRET (behind) (2012), Oil on hardboard cut to silhouette (painted obverse and reverse) each piece individually: 20×30 in; Colleen Kiely, GONE TO FEED THE ROSES #8 (2012), archival marker, graphite and gesso on museum board, 32×40 in.

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I made it. Now what do I call it?

We’ve been exploring issues artists encounter in their work, and we recently asked artists in different disciplines: How do you choose your titles?

Paul Endres, Jr, painter
Being a painter in a digital age is, at least in part, a contradiction. Many artists might also suggest that providing titles to their visually-based art is also a contradiction of sorts, or at least unnecessary, and in some cases I would agree. However, my work is the descendent of a specific niche of art history, 19th century history and portrait painting, one that not only requires titles, but also depends on them to explain the narratives or patrons.

My work is an ongoing series of paintings about an alternate reality in which a disastrous unseen event known as the American Burden is causing destruction and civil war. The paintings exist as memorials to these events; fictional historical artifacts. So for me, at this time and making this work, naming a piece is like the planets aligning, in that there are many criteria to fulfill. The titles must further complicate the image by providing an additional context, give insight into the narrative, and to hint at the illogical nature of the individuals of this reality, who like us, thrive on contradiction.

Jason Palmer, jazz composer
I’ve always found it to be as big a challenge to adequately name a composition as it is to write it, especially if I’m composing purely for the sake of composing, and not for a particular project. Luckily I’ve always found inspiration for titles from people, places, and events that I’ve related to. I’ve used “plays on words” as titles (especially if it happens to be a “quirky” melody). I’ve come to find that my compositions usually resonate with the listener to a stronger degree if they have a catchy title and a story that conveys the inspiration for the title.

Kathryn Burak, author of Emily’s Dress and Other Missing Things
To my mind, the best title is taken. Picnic, Lightning, Billy Collins’s fourth collection of poems, took the prize a while back. Collins’s title comes from a line in Lolita. “My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three.” Who would think the best title in the world would be tucked into parentheses in chapter two? (Okay, Billy Collins would.) So, when my editor, Nancy Mercado, told me the sales and marketing team decided my very quiet title, The Dress, needed to reflect the excitement in the plot – the road trip! the mystery! – I automatically said, “Sure. As long as we can find a Picnic, Lightning.” Though Nancy agreed having a perfect title would be nice, she admitted that she wasn’t sure how much a title might make or break a book – providing you don’t hit the apex, as Collins did.

Before this request to retitle my book came, I had joined a collaborative marketing group for debut YA writers (The Class of 2k12), and we had already printed up a mass mailing advertising my quiet title. I quickly sent word that the new batch of posters and postcards to librarians should have my new, more action-packed title, How People Disappear. It wasn’t until my third and final title got the okay, months later, from sales and marketing (Emily Dickinson needed to be a part of the title, they thought) that I realized how many different books I was promoting with my group – three books, or at least three titles – on bookmarks, mass mailings, and websites. Oh, and the current title – Emily’s Dress and Other Missing Things – everybody shortens it to Emily’s Dress. Not that far off the original.

Masha Obolensky, playwright
I know some writers who start with the title. I never do. Coming up with a title is always challenging for me. It is often something I do when I find myself lost. So I throw down the gauntlet – what is at the heart of this play, Masha? Say it in a few words. A few years ago I wrote a play about girls and desire and after I had completed a first draft I brought it to my class at Boston University. Hearing my cohorts’ comments, I realized that I was walking a fine line and that what I had written could easily be misinterpreted. I decided to entitle it The Girl Problem. It’s not mysterious like my other titles – this one definitely positions me, the writer, in relation to the material. Giving the play this title helped me to sharpen the play, while allowing me to keep the ambiguity that had elicited so many different interpretations among my classmates.

Read part two of How Do You Choose Your Titles? featuring a choreographer, poet, glass artist, and painter.

Image: Paul Endres, Jr, THE OATH OF HAMILTONIAN INACTION (2011) acrylic on canvas, 62×96 in.

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Artists Candice Smith Corby and Leslie Schomp are wearing multiple hats (visually dazzling ones, no doubt). As they continue to create personally resonant mixed-media art, they’re also curators of Self/Fabricated, an intriguing exhibition of work by artists (including the curators, Jan Johnson, and others) who explore autobiography through cloth and stitching. The show opens at the Art Complex Museum in Duxbury September ’12.

Recently, they’ve added a “fundraiser” hat to the stack. Through June 1, the artists are using USA Projects to raise funds for an exhibition catalog.

Here, they answer our cur8or eight questions with multi-talented aplomb.

Explain the idea behind Self/Fabricated.
Candice and Leslie: We have been close friends for awhile and around 4 yrs ago we were admiring each other’s work and how we would love to see it shown together sometime. We were imagining someone else curating us into their show – both of us wishing some magic curator would call us up. We were both using cloth and images of ourselves in our work, albeit quite differently, and we share similar loves of vintage fabric and old pastimes of stitching, ie. tea towels, table cloths, doilies, sampler’s etc. There was more to these tokens than just their practical use. Each one told a story not just in the stains and physical wear but of course also in how they were marked, painted on and embroidered. There was an empathy for someone who had spent hours of both toil and enjoyment in the creation of these items. As both of us were married and mothers, we were also at the same time balancing domestic work, employment and work as artists.

Once the lightbulb went off that we could organize our own show, the inclusion of the other artists, Jan Johnson, Ilona Anderson, Joetta Maue, Wylie Garcia Sopia, and David Curcio, happened pretty organically. Each artist wowed us with their return to stitching methods and reference of cloth as well as how they were attempting to identify, describe, or invent one’s one identity, life’s story or self through traditional and poetic self-portraiture. The word Fabricated is not just about cloth but also about how we create our own stories.

Being a curator is like being a a) circus ringleader, b) high-wire performer, or c) driver of the clown car.
Leslie: Being a curator feels to me like being a circus ringleader. What I love about our show is how varied the work is even though the artists identify so strongly with each other. Also the practical elements of being a curator; the various tasks and concerns are again so varied-from writing, business elements, laying out the space of the show, etc.

Candice: I would say all of the above! I’ve found that I have to be the one in charge of complete chaos but act like I am completely unfrazzled with steady poise and also being open to spontaneous wacky ideas and personality quirks.

What’s the most surprising response you’ve ever had to your work?
Candice: When I was an undergrad, I made a pretty dramatic – overly dramatic – sculptural work with film and text influence by a dream and family memories. I was shocked by the emotive response and also saw the power that art can sometimes have. I think it also made me realize I wanted more joy and humor in my work one day.

Leslie: This sounds kind of crazy but the most surprising response to my work was written in a guest book at a solo show I had. It said the work was “shockingly personal.” I suppose I was surprised because I always thought that the personal was obscured through lines, marks and veiled layering.

The unauthorized biography of your life is titled:
Leslie: I can’t imagine how others see my life, but here are a few attempts (some serious and some a joke): A Life in Grey: the Quiet Years; or I Don’t Know!: the Leslie Schomp Story; or The Girl with the Last Name That is Like a Sound Effect.

Candice: Most Improved, OR Easily Entertained.

Share a surprise twist in the Leslie Schomp/Candice Smith Corby story.
Leslie: My son marries Candice’s daughter one day, and we become Grandmother sisters! Or that our kids grow up and become artists and do really fun surprising work.

Candice: We switch hairstyles. We open a yoga/tae kwon do/knitting studio.

What is the most misunderstood aspect of being a curator?
Candice: Simultaneously being introverted and extroverted. That it involves being a high-end administrative assistant and an event planner.

What are you currently reading?
Leslie: I’m currently reading A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Girl, which is a collection of writings by Irish authors about their childhoods, edited by and based on interviews with John Quinn.

Candice: Six different home decor magazines and Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England.

Fill in the blanks: a stitch in ________ saves ________.
Candice and Leslie: We got stumped! “A stitch in yours saves mine?”

Self/Fabricated is funding on USA Projects through June 1, 2012.

Images: still images from USA Projects video: Self/Fabricated, work by David Curcio, and work by Joetta Maue; Leslie Schomp, SELF PORTRAIT WITH SON (2007), hair and nylon thread on found handkerchiefs, embroidery hoops.

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Film & Video Entries are now being accepted for the Dallas VideoFest. Learn more.
Deadline: May 15, 2012

Poets The Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, established by The American Poetry Review, is currently accepting entries. Poets must be under 40 years of age. Learn more.
Deadline: May 15, 2012

Visual Artists The Brooklyn Artists Gym is now accepting entries for their exhibition Matter, a show which aims to create conversations in terms of the traditional and nontraditional materials used in constructing the artworks. Open call for all mediums (sculptural/3D media, video, performance, and surface design are highly encouraged), 2D /3D work no larger than 8’ in direction. Email an Open Call Submission Package with-3 jpeg images and brief, one paragraph, artist statement to show@brooklynartistsgym.com
Deadline: May 29, 2012

Sculpture Project Proposals The SculptureCenter in New York seeks proposals that offer new ways of considering sculpture or further the understanding of the discipline and how it can intersect with architecture, performance, painting, photography, film and video, sound, and new mediums. Learn more.
Deadline: June 24, 2012

Practitioners of the Performing Arts of India The American Institute of Indian Studies is now excepting applications for fellowships to accomplished practitioners of the performing arts of India and creative artists who demonstrate that study in India would enhance their skills, develop their capabilities to teach or perform in the U.S., enhance American involvement with India’s artistic traditions, and strengthen their links with peers in India. Learn more.
Deadline: July 1, 2012

Musicians, Performers, Craft Artists Registrations are now being accepted to be a vendor at Lynn’s FallFest on the Waterfront on Saturday, September 22, 2012 as part of Essex National Heritage Park’s regional Sails and Trails event. Learn more.
Deadline: August 3, 2012

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