In recent years, the “open call” has become an almost inescapable mechanism within the field of contemporary jewelry. Exhibitions, international competitions, prestigious residencies, and bustling festival weeks increasingly rely on this digital format as a seemingly democratic, merit-based method for discovering fresh artistic talent and generating broad visibility. Yet, beneath the surface of this ubiquitous system, critical voices are beginning to emerge from both sides of the application portal. Organizers and artists are asking a fundamental question: Why has a format designed to promote inclusivity frequently resulted in a structure where artists shoulder an escalating share of the administrative labor, financial risk, and emotional investment?
This pressing debate took center stage during a roundtable discussion titled Open Calls and Contemporary Jewelry, held on November 22, 2025, at the DIVA museum in Antwerp during the city’s Obsessed! festival. Moderated expertly by art historian Saskia van Es, the panel brought together a diverse group of voices deeply embedded in the field: artists Into Niilo and Liesbet Bussche, freelance curator Ebba Van der Taelen, and Tom Iriks, curator at the DIVA museum and author of these reflections. As the conversation unfolded, one stark reality quickly became apparent: event organizers and artist applicants often understand, experience, and navigate the open-call ecosystem in radically different ways.
Rejection as Part of Professional Life
The discussion commenced with art historian Saskia van Es projecting slides of the provocative artwork Open Calls, created by Ana Escobar Saavedra. The visual piece draws conceptual inspiration from Rachel Mason’s widely discussed essay Artist as Applicant, which maps out a cultural system where the daily labor of a creative practitioner gradually shifts from the physical making of art to the ceaseless submission of applications.
Escobar’s installation features a glass cube intricately engraved with exact phrases routinely encountered in open-call guidelines. Visitors read constraints such as "Work must fit in 30 x 30 x 30 centimetres," "We only exhibit wearable jewelry," and the ubiquitous demographic barrier, "Applicants must be under 35." The sculpture serves as an almost agonizingly accurate metaphor for the open-call system itself, capturing words trapped inside a rigid glass enclosure with barely enough room to breathe.
The second component of Escobar’s installation, titled Maybe Next March, reproduces the standardized, impersonal rejection email sent out for years by the organizers of the renowned Schmuck exhibition in Munich. The template reads, "Dear Artist, we are sorry to inform you that your work was not selected for Schmuck," followed smoothly by a polite invitation for the rejected applicant to nevertheless travel to Munich to attend the festivities. In this context, institutional rejection is transformed into a routine—an automated form of bureaucratic politeness that manufactures physical and psychological distance while feigning professional proximity.
A ripple of bitter laughter moved through the audience as these realities were unpacked. Most contemporary artists have long since learned to accept rejection as an unavoidable, recurring ritual of professional life. However, the true arbitrariness of these selection barriers became painfully evident when the panel turned its focus to age limits. Artists who do not follow a linear, traditional career path frequently find themselves entirely excluded before they have even been given the chance to establish a foothold in the field.
While age thresholds are routinely defended by institutions as a necessary form of support for "emerging artists," this policy relies on the flawed assumption that youth and emerging status are synonymous. In reality, many contemporary jewelry artists begin their creative journeys later in life, transition from entirely different careers, or gain access to formal education and economic resources much later. Consequently, a criterion intended to foster inclusivity easily transforms into a mechanism of structural exclusion.
The Open Call Fan Club and Conflicting Definitions
The widespread adoption of open calls reveals a great deal about how contemporary jewelry as a discipline understands, structures, and sustains itself. During the Antwerp roundtable, the term "open call" was stretched to encompass a dizzying array of practices and institutional goals: it was described simultaneously as a democratic opportunity, a practical logistical tool, a curatorial method, a nascent business model, and a vital networking platform.
From the institutional perspective of a curator and public mediator at a museum like DIVA, the open call often functions as an invaluable pragmatic instrument. Scouting artists globally demands vast amounts of time and specialized research, whereas a well-publicized open call naturally brings unfamiliar, cutting-edge work directly to an institution’s attention. At the same time, organizers often find themselves hoping to rescue the format from its worst manifestations. When listening back to the audio recording of the roundtable, the sentiment expressed by organizers—being a fan of the format only when it is executed with genuine care—underscores a crucial nuance. The core problem does not necessarily lie in the existence of open calls, but rather in how they are deployed today as a lazy default solution for structural shortages in time, institutional resources, and creative curatorial vision.
For panelist Ebba Van der Taelen, founder of Unpolished—a platform dedicated to highlighting emerging Belgian jewelry artists—the open call played a very specific role. Because the platform was expressly created to carve out space for unfamiliar, grassroots voices, an open call appeared to be the most natural starting point. When organizing an exhibition centered around themes of identity and transformation, the resulting selection of submitted works functioned not merely as a group presentation, but equally as the platform’s inaugural public curatorial statement.
Yet, even within independent platforms, the utopian ideal of absolute openness quickly collided with inescapable practical limitations. The call in question was launched immediately prior to the summer holidays, a period when academic institutions and community workshops were completely closed. Promotion relied heavily on targeted Instagram advertisements and digital circulation across social media algorithms. Long before a jury ever convened to make a selection, digital visibility was already dictating the outcome. Artists first had to happen across the announcement, precisely meet the rigid criteria, and possess the requisite free time and financial resources to assemble a professional portfolio during the height of the summer break. Despite best intentions, platforms seeking open accessibility remain inextricably bound to the algorithms and academic calendars that govern modern visibility.
Open Call Season and the Artist’s Burden
Standing in stark contrast to the institutional perspective of the organizer is the lived reality of the applicant. Artist Into Niilo vividly described contemporary application cycles as an exhausting marathon heavily concentrated during the autumn months of October and November—jokingly referred to within the community as "open call season." Niilo also compared the exhausting cycle to a game of chance, evoking the poignant image of artists tossing sealed bottles into a vast ocean in the faint hope that an unseen recipient might eventually respond.
Beyond the psychological toll, this "gambling" reflects severe economic realities. Artists frequently pay non-refundable application fees, expensive international transport costs, and specialized insurance premiums. Many are also required to cover their own travel and accommodation expenses if selected, simply because their physical presence is demanded at the exhibition opening. All of these financial burdens are stacked on top of the immense, entirely unpaid labor required to conceptualize, photograph, and prepare digital portfolios, artist statements, and detailed application forms.
As a result, a massive portion of the financial and operational risk has quietly shifted away from cultural institutions and landed squarely on the shoulders of the individual artist. For cash-strapped organizations, the open call offers an efficient mechanism for gathering vast numbers of submissions with minimal staff and resources. For the artist, however, participation has devolved into a high-stakes financial investment offering zero guarantee of visibility, critical dialogue, sales, or financial remuneration.
Curatorial Poverty and Narrative Theft
Panelist Liesbet Bussche voiced deep, principled hesitation regarding her own participation in open calls, directing her critique not merely at the mechanics of the application process, but at what these calls have collectively replaced. Bussche noted a profound absence of rigorously curated exhibitions built around deeply researched themes, substantive critical criteria, and long-term, supportive engagement between curators and artists.
According to Bussche, open calls far too frequently result in superficial "one-piece shows"—exhibitions that restrict participants to submitting a single work per artist. In such hurried environments, artworks can rarely be presented as their creators originally intended, leaving virtually no room for broader context or narrative depth. Jewelry is abruptly reduced to an isolated object expected to single-handedly represent an entire artistic practice while fighting for fleeting attention among dozens of competing entries.
In these crowded exhibitions, jewelry risks becoming entirely detached from the intimate stories, conceptual frameworks, and material investigations that generated it. During the Antwerp discussion, this dynamic was aptly described as a form of "narrative theft." Jewelry inherently deals with bodily intimacy, personal history, and narrative, yet these open-call exhibitions frequently present objects stripped entirely of their context. Consequently, the open call threatens to become little more than a logistics-driven distribution mechanism for isolated luxury objects rather than a genuine curatorial proposition, producing an uncritical accumulation of items rather than a cohesive intellectual argument.
Bussche strongly contends that contemporary art and design academies must begin equipping students to critically assess and question open calls, teaching them to recognize when a system divorces ideas from their broader practice and reduces complex artworks to mere digital images circulating within a ruthless economy of visibility.
Transparency, Responsibility, and the Way Forward
One of the most illuminating moments of the roundtable occurred when the participants directly compared two separate calls issued by respected organizations: a themed group exhibition organized by the WearHouse in Amsterdam, and the Italian Montebello Award. The side-by-side comparison made it glaringly obvious that these initiatives represented two entirely different systemic models—one functioning as a curated group exhibition, while the other operated fundamentally as a competitive prize.
This distinction is vital because the label "open call" is currently applied indiscriminately to a wide variety of administrative structures. Under this single banner, the field lumps together curated museum exhibitions, high-stakes international prizes, remote residencies, crowded festivals, and commercial networking platforms, each carrying completely distinct expectations, power dynamics, and economic models.
Throughout the afternoon, the discussion continually circled back to the urgent question of institutional responsibility. What does the rhetoric of "openness" actually mean when selection criteria remain vague, when organizers provide minimal background information, or when artists are left to subsidize the physical production, transport, and staging of an institution’s exhibition? True openness without operational clarity does not foster genuine accessibility; it generates confusion and systemic exclusion.
The participants argued persuasively for a necessary cultural shift away from "openness as a marketing strategy" and toward "openness as institutional responsibility." This calls for a return to practices where transparency, contextual framing, fair financial compensation, and shared care are prioritized by those holding the institutional keys.
If contemporary jewelry continues to proudly insist upon its intimate relationship with the human body, valuing tactile touch, personal storytelling, and the rich social life of objects, the field must confront a hard truth: it must actively build and maintain the infrastructures that genuinely sustain those human values.
To translate these critical insights into practical change, the reflections gathered during the roundtable have been distilled into a set of concrete recommendations for both organizers and applicants. Available as an online resource via the Art Jewelry Forum library, this checklist converts the concerns raised in Antwerp into actionable questions surrounding transparency, financial compensation, fair selection procedures, and curatorial accountability. Designed not as a rigid rulebook, but as a flexible tool to encourage healthier, more sustainable practices, it points a way forward.
Ana Escobar’s engraved glass cube stands as a lasting, potent symbol for the contemporary jewelry community: a transparent structure that simultaneously encloses, protects, and confines. As the field looks to the future, the primary question facing artists and institutions alike is no longer how the exterior of the glass might be made more attractive, but rather whether artists can still breathe comfortably inside it.
