This exhibition is to benefit the New York Studio School and celebrate our community in the holiday season.

Submission is open to New York Studio School Alumni, Past and Present Faculty, Staff, and current Students.

All artists whose work is selected will automatically be eligible for consideration for a Mercedes Matter Award, to be awarded at the opening event.

The call for art opens September 25 and closes October 25, 2026. The exhibition will be open to the public from December 11, 2026 to January 10, 2027.

Submissions must relate to the exhibition title: Personae

Who are we when we are being watched? Who are we when no one is looking?

A persona can be a mask, a costume, a character, a performance, a fantasy, a projection, or simply a version of ourselves we have decided to inhabit. In many traditions, emotions, places and ideas are personified and given personae. We invent personae for other people, for animals, for ourselves, and sometimes without realizing we are making them at all. They can protect us, disguise us, exaggerate us, or reveal something we otherwise could not say.

Personae wants works that play with these shifting versions of the self and the subject. The work need not be explicitly figurative or autobiographical. The exhibition is interested in the space between the person, the idea of self and the character: the images we receive and present, the beings we imagine ourselves to be, and the forms that emerge.

A persona might appear as a portrait, a body, a fictional character, a recurring image, a gesture, a disguise, or something much stranger. What matters is an interest in the ways identity can be invented, performed, obscured, or exposed.