THEME: “IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT (AND I FEEL FINE)”

“We want to create a show that highlights the range of our go-to and inventive coping mechanisms for the current moment. Artists after all are also humans, and it must be all but impossible to silo what happens in the world from what happens in the studio.

Do you garden, cook, or meditate, protest and organize, doom-scroll or re-read classic books, obsess over true crime podcasts and gallows humor, take up witchcraft or cycling, sink into nostalgia or self-medicating… news junkie or news blackout…? How do these dynamics manifest in your art? What do you think art has to offer to the discourse—provocation and challenge, healing and rest, a tether to history, or something else entirely?

As this theme is quite broad and open to thoughtful interpretation, we anticipate a great mix of beauty and dark humor in the entries. And we feel that as this is basically a universal experience at this moment—no matter what side you identify with any discourse, the world *as we have known it* is ending—a secondary goal is to let people know they aren’t alone with these burdens.

We think it would be great and super interesting to give people the lyrics to the REM song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)” and get them to read through and respond to any line that moves them—as a prompt to create or source their own archive with this perspective in mind. Also as Gen-Xers Andi and Shana both have memories of this song in 1987 but looking again it’s SO prescient we got chills… well, you’ll see.”