Apply now to our Southern Competition if you live in states: AL, AR, DC, FL, GA, KY, LA, MD, MS, NC, SC, TN, VA, WV. For more information visit the competitions page of our website. Good luck!

Juror: Dominic Molon, Richard Brown Baker Curator of Contemporary Art, RISD Museum of Art

Deadline: December 31st, 2014

Rebecca Farr’s recent solo show at Klowden-Mann was a strong force to be reckoned with--both in terms of the physical presence of her paintings and in the contending contemplation her subject demanded.

With heavy paint on blotted and torn, layered paper, Farr collages print photos from 1970s and 80s coffee table books as her source material. She layers those with paper and heavy paint on wood panel, creating works that feel dense and heavy, yet very exciting and current.

Farr paints photos into vague suggestions of landscape paintings, as if her subjects inhabit a ghost world or ethereal dream. In “Sweet Broken Now,” Farr’s third solo show at Klowden-Mann, Farr made Manifest Destiny her subject of inquiry and aimed to capture the complex history arising from the ideology and religious fervor that justified white westward expansion during the early 1900s. – Ellen C. Caldwell, Los Angeles Contributor

Rebecca Farr | Installation view featuring Tilth 1, 2014, Mixed media on wood panel, 48 x 72”. Courtesy of Klowden-Mann.

As a culmination of a recent winter residency in Denali National Park, Far North marks Beau Carey’s second exhibition at Goodwin Fine Art in Denver, CO. This recent offering showcases a group of exquisitely painted artic environments that highlight contemporary themes of globalization, environmental concerns and the variety of constructs that shape our perceptions of landscape. No stranger to the harsh conditions of the northern-most hemisphere, Carey’s inclusion in the Artic Circle Residency in 2012 prompted an interest in coastal surveying and profiling, a theme he hopes to continue next year during a residency at Rabbit Island, a remote, 91-acre forested island on Lake Superior three miles east of Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula. I recently caught up with Carey to discuss his work. – Claude Smith, Albuquerque/Santa Fe Contributor

Beau Carey | Batholith, 2014, oil on canvas, 40 x 46 inches; image courtesy the artist

Albuquerque-based artist Michael Cook (#42, #114) has long been exploring the vast terrain of both landscape and our perceptions of it. Citing an interest in semiotics and specifically, the point at which “objects become visible in culture” he often conflates symbols, language and diagrams to build complex, multi-layered compositions. In his current exhibition The Notion of Landscape at the Francis McCray Gallery of Contemporary Art at Western New Mexico University in Silver City, NM, Cook presents a diverse body of work that spans the years 1981-2009. –Claude Smith Albuquerque/Santa Fe Contributor

Michael Cook | Venetian (Alamogordo) 2007-2009, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 inches; image courtesy the artist

After a sleepy summer the art world is once again up and running full tilt. Among the hundreds of painting shows on view throughout the country this month are close to three-dozen solos by New American Paintings’ alumni. They range from shows by talented emerging artists such as Samantha Bittman at Andrew Rafacz in Chicago and Suzannah Sinclair in Boston to strong mid-career painters such as the phenomenal Sarah McEneaney at Tibor de Nagy in New York City and Emily Eveleth at Miller Yezerski Gallery in Boston. I want to give a special shout out to my buddy Eddie Martinez, whose show at the new Kohn Gallery space in Los Angeles confirms what many already knew: Eddie is one of the best natural painters of his generation.

Sarah McEneaney. Courtesy of Tibor de Nagy.

There is a lot of good abstraction on view this month. For those in New York City, the fearless Chris Martin has his debut at Anton Kern Gallery and the much-hyped Norwegian artist Fredrik Vaerslev can be considered at Andrew Kreps Gallery. Also in New York, co-curator for the 2014 Whitney Biennial and juror for our upcoming Northeast issue, Michelle Grabner, has just opened a must-see show at James Cohan Gallery. In Los Angeles, don’t miss Sam Falls at Hannah Hoffman and Pia Fries at Christopher Grimes Gallery. If you are in the Bay Area, visit Jessica Silverman Gallery to see the work of Hugh Scott-Douglas, who, like an increasing number of emerging artists, is obsessed with process.

While abstraction continues to look good this season, representational painting has been making a comeback and it owns the month. Over the past two years, more and more young artists have been engaging with imagery, in particular the figure. There are the aforementioned exhibitions by Sarah McEneaney and Suzannah Sinclair to consider. In New York City, emerging artist Gina Beavers continues to push impasto to the limits in her new group of paintings at Clifton Benevento and the virtuosic Angela Dufresne has a new suite of paintings with figure in landscape at Monya Rowe Gallery. Other shows of note around the country include: Storm Tharp at PDX in Portland, OR; Angela Fraleigh at Inman Gallery in Houston; Whitney Bedford at Carrie Secrist in Chicago; and the group show “Bedtime Stories” at Alpha Gallery in Boston.

In a quiet, but extraordinary exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, LA-based artist Paul Sietsema renders carefully selected imagery with such technical dexterity that they almost revert to real objects. Sietsema is not interested in trompe-l’oeil for the sake of showing off; at the end of the day, his paintings and works on paper are a highly considered critique of the production of cultural objects and the roles that they play as they circulate. Taken as a whole, this exhibition represents the various aspects of how a painting can function. - Steven Zevitas, Publisher

Entry Deadline: October 31, 2014 (Midnight EST)

CALL FOR ARTISTS: MFA ANNUAL
Current Master of Fine Arts Candidates + Current Year MFA Graduates

Benjamin Rogers | Inside the painter's studio - painting in the abbreviated field, 2012, oil on canvas, 45" x 56", courtesy of the artist.

In his first solo exhibition at James Kelly Contemporary in Santa Fe, Phoenix-based artist and recent NYC transplant Matt Magee (NAP #14) offers a bit of a departure from his typically looser, more shapely and often-codified works. In this stripped-down, analytical offering, Recent Paintings and Sculptures features works inspired by observed and imagined forms, collections, data analysis and the Arizona sky. – Claude Smith, Albuquerque/Santa Fe Contributor

Matt Magee | Narita, 2013, oil on panel; image courtesy of James Kelly Contemporary

The first time I came to Seattle was to board a cruise ship, the same reason so many other Northwest outsiders first experience this city. Since I had been traveling with family (not to mention thousands of other cruisers), the only time I recall being alone on the trip was during the cab ride back to the airport, after we returned to port. Sitting in the backseat, moving alongside the lines of cars traveling southbound on I-5, the faint image of Mount Rainier floated among the license plates. It was among this swarm of rendered, friendlier mountains that I first saw the real Rainier, looming seventy miles away, above the mass of clouds that coated the passenger-side window.

Although I have lived here for nine years, and few things I saw during the cruise visit look the same to me now as they did fresh off the ship, Mount Rainier still radiates the same sense of severe immensity, even during its sunniest appearances. Walking into SAM Gallery’s Made in the Northwest show, I was met with a similar hum of severity—this time coming from Seattle artist Ryan Molenkamp’s (NAP #97) painted volcanoes. — Erin Langner, Seattle contributor

Ryan Molenkamp | View from Mt Erie, acrylic on panel, 30 x 40 in., 2014. Image courtesy of the artist.

Edgar Arceneaux’s “A Book and a Medal: Disentanglement Equals Homogenous Abstractions” opened at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects earlier this month. Challenging and compelling, the show is a triple threat of musts (must-see, -feel, and -experience) all in one.

Edgar Arceneaux | installation view of PLATONIC SOLID’S DREAMING/DETROIT’S SHRINKING (Dodecahedron), 2014, Paintings on mirrored glass, graphite and ink on vellum, layered over colored paper, in a hand crafted steel frames. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

The exhibit features the contents of a partially redacted 1964 letter from J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI and part of the “Suicide Package,” blackmailing Dr. Martin Luther King by referencing his extramarital affairs and encouraging him to commit suicide. Another letter that serves as the former’s bookend came 50 years later as Bernice King, MLK’s daughter, urges her siblings not to sell their father’s Nobel Prize and bible (objects for which the show is named). Arceneaux explores the complexity of iconicity and monument-making; history and storytelling; and forgetting and memorializing. Using mirror installations and the shape of the redacted letter as a recognizable and repeated template throughout the exhibit, he creates a mood of intrigue, redundancy, and disjuncture. – Ellen C. Caldwell, Los Angeles Contributor

As the Houston Fine Art Fair is in full swing, one can’t help but think of her younger, hotter sister, Texas Contemporary Art Fair, which finished its three day run last week. Here’s an overview of the state of painting at this year’s Texas Contemporary. - Seth Orion Schwaiger, Austin Contributor

Donnie Molls | Oil Field 1, 2014, mixed media and oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches. Courtesy of Edward Cella Art + Architecture