Application window: Feb 10–April 6, 2025

In celebration of Print Center New York’s 25 year history of platforming guest curators, we invite emerging and early-career curators to submit letters of interest for exhibition opportunities beginning in 2028. Through this curatorial open call—the first in our organization’s history—we aim to identify promising voices and areas of research that are pushing our field forward, and to accelerate professional opportunities for curators who are building the print exhibition and scholarship of tomorrow.

Print Center New York’s curatorial program aims to generate new knowledge and understanding of printmaking’s potential by:

  • locating print within broader artistic, historical, and cultural contexts

  • re-examining and expanding established histories and narratives

  • fostering cross-disciplinary conversation

  • making print visible and accessible to non-specialist audiences

  • imagining possible futures and developing new theoretical frameworks

Submit your materials to programs@printcenternewyork.org with the subject line “Curatorial Open Call Letter of Interest.” Please be sure to read the sections below.

Program Features

Print Center New York works collaboratively with guest curators in service of realizing their projects at their fullest potential. To support guest curators’ intellectual growth and professional development, Print Center convenes a working group of subject-area experts who act as a sounding board at key intervals in a project’s development. Print Center New York’s curatorial staff also provides guidance and feedback on areas such as project conceptualization and argumentation; exhibition writing; and public engagement and publication development. Our team handles project management, logistics, and budget administration, and all aspects of exhibition production and installation, outreach, and publicity.

Guest curators working with Print Center New York have their exhibition on view in our main exhibition space, the Jordan Schnitzer Gallery, on the ground floor of 24th Street in Chelsea. The gallery is approximately 1800 square feet, and floor plans will be shared with curators we invite to submit full proposals. We are able to borrow works from a range of lenders, including institutional/museum collections.

Our exhibitions are on view for approximately 12 weeks and are accompanied by a roster of public programming and, typically, a modest publication (approximately 100 pages, 5×7.5” softcover, designed in-house; contains full color images, a curatorial essay of approximately 3,000 words, and additional text and elements, as appropriate). We publish a more substantial hardcover book in partnership with art book publishers approximately once every other year.

Curator Eligibility

We can support emerging and early-career curators based anywhere in the United States, as long as they can be present for key dates such as exhibition installation, opening, and select programming. Anyone with an SSN or ITIN is eligible to receive payment. We define “emerging and early career” as those having less than 15 years of professional arts experience, which may include curatorial or museum work, art writing and/or research, organizing arts programming, working with artists and programmers, and so forth.

We welcome letters of interest from artists, but only if the project they’re pursuing does not include their own work.

Financial Support

Guest curators receive an unrestricted curatorial fee, plus, if needed, an additional travel budget that can be used for curatorial research and related exhibition travel. The amounts of these fees and budgets vary, depending on the scale and scope of the project (contributing factors include, for example: whether a project will include a substantial publication; whether the curator wants to lead the development of associated public programming; or how much original research is needed to realize the project). Current curatorial fees begin at $5,000 and scale upward.

Print Center New York covers all exhibition, publication, and public programming costs.

How to Apply

We invite curators to submit a brief letter of interest (no more than 500 words) describing the project they want to pursue at Print Center, plus their current resume/CV, to programs@printcenternewyork.org with “Curatorial Open Call Letter of Interest” in the subject line. Please do not send checklists or image decks at this stage.

Letters of interest should outline a concise and compelling pitch for an exhibition the curator would like to develop. Curators should express how the project generates new knowledge and may want to consider the following:

  • What questions does your research/project aim to explore?

  • Where are you in the process of developing this idea? Why does it excite you?

  • What similar exhibitions exist? How is your proposed project different?

We’ll invite curators with ideas that excite us and align with our programmatic priorities to prepare full exhibition proposals for our consideration. Curators invited to prepare full proposals will be compensated $300 for their additional time. Projects we decide not to move forward with will remain the intellectual property of the curator.

Letters of interest will be accepted through April 6, 2025, and will be reviewed by Print Center New York’s curatorial team at the close of the open call window. Applicants can expect to receive an invitation to submit a full proposal for consideration by the end of April.

Website link: https://www.printcenternewyork.org/curator-open-call

CuratorialExhibitionGrantTravel costs