CALL FOR ART: Rend, Turn, Follow
“Rend your heart
and not your garments.
Return to the Lord your God,
for he is gracious and compassionate,
slow to anger and abounding in love,
and he relents from sending calamity.” Joel 2:13
In Joel 2, the prophet uses a powerful word picture to describe the act of repentance. It starts with rending, literally tearing something in half. In this case, the prophet urges the people to rend their hearts and not their garments; to not just play-at repentance and grief over sin but to truly do the hard work. Repenting, turning away, requires us to go hard into honesty and humility, to lay aside our pride. Most churches talk about repentance, even include it in their liturgies or order of worship, yet we witness every year Christians leaders and laity who struggle to get beyond an apology to truly repent. And, if we’re honest with ourselves, we probably see the same tendency in ourselves, to want to self protect, to minimize or dodge responsibility…to rend our garments but leave our hearts intact.
Because the Bible uses this particular word picture and many others like it to describe repentance we begin to see and not just hear the truth. Rending our heart with the intensity and strength one would engage in to tear our clothes helps us visualize what we need to do to honestly repent from the wrongs we engage in. The word repentance itself contains a picture of making a u-turn, of not continuing down a path that leads to destruction, but turning to follow God instead. The word pictures help enliven our imaginations to follow Christ more fully in humility and honesty.
Rend, Turn, Follow seeks to use art to describe the act of true repentance and turning to follow the way of Jesus. We want to explore how our faith, stories we tell actually and the postures and liturgies we inhabit shape us as Christians.
In this current moment, it’s rare to see images of Christians repenting, even apologizing. So, this Lent and Easter season we will engage with images that think about what it means to lay down power, choose humility and meekness, see goodness in imitating Christ and his example. Through the images in this show, we will imagine ways to live as a repentant and redeemed people in resurrection hope. What images might we make to describe this process? What gestures would we make to embody this truth? How do we create imaginative space for repentance, humility, and re-engagement with our faith? What does it look like to rend, turn, follow?
Particular themes to explore are gestures of repentance, what it looks like to truly repent and not just apologize, performativity, meekness, humility, empathy/suffering with, grieving over sin/brokenness, imitation of Christ, and what forgiveness and reconciliation might look like.
SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS:
Use the link below to fill out the call for art form. Submissions must include an artist statement that responds specifically to the call, as well as an artist bio, and up to 5 images per submitted piece. Submitted images should be in a 5mb jpegs labelled with the:
Artist Last Name_First Name_Title of the Piece.
There is no cost to apply.
Our gallery currently only accepts 2D, wall hung work from the following mediums: photography, painting, drawing, printmaking, collage, poetry, and mixed media. Some 3D work may be accepted if it is small (taking up less than a square foot of floor space) and can be displayed against a wall. At this time we do not accept video work, AI generated work, work designed to be hung from the ceiling, or 3D work designed to be seen in-the-round. Work must be ready to hang; we will accept framed and unframed work. Framed work should be hung by wire, or be able to be hung by command strips. Unframed work should be able to be pinned, hung by clips or by command strips (clips or other such hanging hardware should be provided by the artist).
All submissions will be considered.
Submission Deadline: 02/08/2026
Notification of Acceptance: 02/13/2026
Artwork delivery date: 02/27/2026
Install 03/02/2026 - 03/07/2026
Exhibition Dates: 03/08/2026 - 05/31/2026