Call to Artists

LUCENT WATERS: a group exhibition curated by Jessica Libor

Submission deadline: June 19th, 2026

This is a digital exhibition AND a physical exhibition. Some work will be selected for digital exhibition only, and a select portion of entries will be selected for the in-person, exhibition at the Hamptons Fine Art Fair in Southampton, NY.

Important Dates

• Open Call Begins: Today

• Submission Deadline: June 19th, midnight

• Notification of Acceptance: June 22nd

• Artwork Arrival (just for selected works for in-person exhibition): July 1st (Wayne, PA, full address will be provided to accepted artists)

• Online Exhibition Duration: July 1st – October 1st

• In-Person Exhibition: July 9 – July 12 (Hamptons Fine Art Fair, Southampton, NY)

View our Lucent Waters inspiration board on Pinterest here.

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

Lucent Waters considers water as both shimmering material presence and symbolic idea of renewal. The exhibition moves through water as substance and as spiritual concept: reflective, absorptive, and always in motion, holding the imprint of what passes through it while resisting fixed definition.

Across histories of image-making, ritual, and myth, water has functioned as a site of passage: between states of consciousness, between worlds of the visible and the unseen. It is repeatedly invoked as threshold and conduit: a surface that both reveals and conceals, where crossing is a shift in perception. In Lucent Waters, water becomes a living interface between physical transformation and symbolic charge.

The works in the exhibition engage the chromatic and atmospheric conditions of water in its many forms. Coastal surfaces become fields of diffraction, where light fractures into particulate shimmer and the material world takes on a charged translucence. Sea glass, shaped by erosion and time, carries the memory of contact, its softened edges holding the history of transformation through resistance and return.

Waterfalls are approached as sites of energetic passage, where gravity and movement generate a visible charge in the air, as though atmosphere itself becomes activated through descent. Fountains recall historical and mythic systems of renewal, where water is endlessly recirculated as a gesture toward celebration and continuity. Within this lineage, water is often seen as a portal substance, associated with rites of cleansing, initiation, and transition, where immersion or contact marks a symbolic crossing from one state of being to another. The myth of the fountain of youth persists here as an inherited image within cultural imagination, an enduring projection of regeneration embedded in human longing.

Rain enters the exhibition as a form of transmission between sky and ground, an atmospheric exchange that reconfigures surface and perception. Across many traditions, rain is also seen as a descent of blessing or cleansing: a ritual that resets the relationship between land, body, and time. Rivers extend this logic over duration, carrying sediment, light, and residue across shifting geographies, becoming continuous and evolving records of passage.

At night, water becomes luminous in different registers: bioluminescent shores, reflective tidal surfaces, and celestial imprints upon still bodies of water. These moments are approached as threshold conditions, where visibility becomes altered and perception thins at the edge of material form—where water functions as a passageway between the terrestrial and the cosmic, bordering on the transcendent.

Lucent Waters also turns inward, toward water as the condition of the body. Within us, water is a necessary structure present in circulation, breath, and the ongoing processes that sustain life.

Taken together, the exhibition frames water as an operative field in which material, emotional, and perceptual states are in constant exchange. The works gathered here propose water a shimmering conduit of life, a threshold between worlds is continually reimagined through light, reflection, and flow.

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Jessica Libor (b. 1987) is an American artist whose work explores themes of feminine identity and the transformative power of storytelling in the creation of personal mythology. She earned her Master of Fine Arts from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2014 and has pursued further classical training at the Grand Central Atelier and the Florence Academy of Art.

Based in Philadelphia yet active in New York, Libor has maintained an active studio practice since completing her MFA. Her artistic vision is deeply informed by narrative and symbolic traditions, drawing particular inspiration from global fairy tales—a recurring motif throughout her work. Artist residencies have played a pivotal role in this exploration; in 2022 and 2023, she participated in several residencies in Scotland and France, experiences that enriched her engagement with myth and folklore. Her most recent artist residency was Spring 2026 at the Akureyri Art Museum in Iceland, where she researched Nordic mythology.

In 2023, Libor presented her work in two solo exhibitions: her international debut at La Serre Wangari in Paris, France, and a stateside show at Look Listen Gallery in Philadelphia, PA. She was also selected to exhibit in the SPRING/BREAK Art Show in New York City in 2025 and most recently exhibited her solo show and curatorial project She in the Tower in May 2026 in Brooklyn, NYC.

Her work is held in private collections internationally and has been exhibited in numerous institutions, including the Independence Seaport Museum, the Louisiana Art and Science Museum, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Masonic Library and Museum. In addition to her visual art practice, she is the host of The Creative Heroine Podcast, where she explores the intersection of creativity, storytelling, and the feminine spirit.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

For full submission guidelines, click the button below and fill out the form to access.

Featured artwork: The Fountains at Night, World Columbian Exposition, 1893, by Winslow Homer, public domain. Impression, Sunrise, by Claude Monet, 1972, public domain. Hieronymos Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (left panel detail), 1505, pubic domain. Charles Conder, A Holiday at Mentone, 1888, public domain.