Submission Deadline: March 15, 2026

Exhibition Dates: July 10-August 28,2026

Location: John A. Day Gallery, University of South Dakota, Warren M. Lee Center for the Fine Arts

The University Art Galleries invites emerging, mid-career, and established artists to submit work for Atmospheric Thinking, a juried exhibition examining contemporary interpretations of the sky as subject, medium, and metaphor. Across disciplines, the sky has served as a site of scientific observation, spiritual imagination, environmental urgency, and aesthetic inquiry. In the context of a rapidly changing atmosphere—meteorological, political, and digital—this exhibition invites artists to interrogate, disrupt, and reimagine the sky beyond its traditional role as a background or horizon.

Atmospheric Thinking encourages artists and viewers to recognize the sky not simply as scenery, but as a dynamic, layered field where perception, ecology, technology, culture, and memory intersect. As climate systems shift, digital networks expand, and questions of visibility, surveillance, and environmental justice intensify, the atmosphere becomes a site of inquiry that reflects and refracts contemporary conditions by engaging with the sky as both a material and a metaphor, illuminating the subtle forces that shape embodied experience and reveal the complex systems that surround us.

Conceptual Framework

  • Sky as Environment: climate, water, air quality, ecology

  • Sky as Concept: perception, phenomenology, immateriality, sensory experience

  • Sky as Technology: satellite imagery, digital clouds, transmission systems, surveillance

  • Sky as Culture: symbolism, cosmology, mythology, place-based knowledge

  • Sky as Archive: memory, temporality, deconstruction, observation

  • Sky as Political Space: land rights, borders, flight, access, visibility

Eligible Media

  • 2D, 3D, installation, video, sound, performance, new media, and interdisciplinary practices. Experimental works and formats are welcome

Submission Requirements

  • Up to 3 artworks per artist

  • High-Quality images (or links for time-based media)

  • Title, medium, dimensions, year completed

  • Artist statement (100-300 words or 1-minute video)

  • Short Bio (100-150 words)

How to Submit

  • Email materials as a single PDF or a link to a clearly labeled folder to uag@usd.edu with the subject line: Atmospheric Thinking Submission-Artist Name

Key Dates

  • Submission Deadline: March 15, 2026

  • Notification of Acceptance: April 15, 2026

  • Accepted Artwork Delivery Deadline: June 15, 2026 (must be received at the John A. Day Gallery by this date)

  • Exhibition Open: July 10, 2026

  • Public Reception: TBD

  • Exhibition closes: August 28, 2026

  • Artworks return or pick-up: Beginning September 7, 2026

Shipping Address

  • University Art Galleries, 414 East Clark Street, Vermillion, SD 57069