OPEN CALL: PORTALS Closes This Month
The exhibition is on view through August 24 in The Shed's Level 2 Gallery and Plaza
By: Stephi Wild Aug. 05, 2025
Twelve early-career, NYC-based artists and collectives present new works in Open Call: Portals, a free group exhibition in The Shed's Level 2 Gallery and on the outdoor Plaza.
Open Call: Portals features new works ranging from painting and film to sculpture and performance by Zain Alam, AYDO, Mel Corchado, Marwa Eltahir, Patricia Encarnación, Laurena Finéus, Lily Honglei, Tyson Houseman, Jarrett Key, Chelsea Odufu, Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez, and Yelaine Rodriguez and Luis Vasquez La Roche, each exploring forces shaping our world, including colonialism, migration, and environmental crisis.
“Beyond the theme of this exhibition, we're thinking about portals as invitations,” said Darren Biggart, Director of Civic Programs. “We hope that audiences find many entry points to engage with new ideas and connect with new communities. These 12 multivalent works provide diverse and unique openings to examine complex ideas and envision a better future.”
In this group exhibition, the artists explore personal stories and ancestral global history to open portals for passage, transformation, and resistance, forging profound connections between the past and present, memory and material, and displacement and belonging. They search for healing out of historical trauma, investigate the ties between political borders and identity, and embrace the enduring power of generational spirituality in our everyday lives.
“These works by artists living and, or working in New York City remind us that identity, memory, and belonging are shaped not in isolation but in the unpredictable interstices of history and the present,” said Dejá Belardo, Assistant Curator of Visual Arts and Civic Programs. “In doing so, the exhibition Open Call: Portals subverts the typical understanding of its title. Instead of spaces meant solely for moving from one point to another, portals in this exhibition open a third space where we might linger, inhabiting the forgotten and the imagined.”
The exhibition, part of the fourth edition of The Shed's cornerstone Open Call program, also includes a roster of public programs, conversations, and performances with the artists and their collaborators, providing deeper access to their commissions. Tickets are free to all Open Call events with a reservation at theshed.org/portals.
Artists selected as part of Open Call, a commissioning program for early-career, NYC-based artists, are redefining what it means to make art. For the program's fourth edition, nearly 1,000 proposals were rigorously reviewed by 72 arts industry leaders in spring 2024. The result: 17 exceptional projects poised to engage and inspire audiences with their inventive, timely, and culturally rich perspectives, including the 12 exhibition artists/collectives and five performance artists/duos who will present in 2026: Nehprii Amenii, Avi Amon, Katherine Paola De La Cruz, Rudi Goblen, Andrew Morrill and James Caverly.
Open Call embodies The Shed's core mission to champion innovative art and ideas across all disciplines; it provides crucial support to these emerging voices, offering each artist a commissioning fee of up to $15,000, tailored to the scope of their project. In addition to financial support, The Shed provides comprehensive production support and resources, empowering artists to fully realize their creative visions.
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