2027 Wind Challenge Exhibition Series - Call for Artists

  • Fleisher Art Memorial (FAM) is excited to announce the call for entries for the 48th exhibition season of the Wind Challenge. Established in 1978 as The Challenge and now known as the Wind Challenge, Fleisher’s annual juried competition is committed to enriching people’s lives through art by featuring the work of exceptional artists living in the region. Artists living within a 450-mile radius of Philadelphia are welcome to apply.

    For this series, nine selected artists will be featured in a trio of Wind Challenge Exhibitions—each featuring three artists—to be hosted at Fleisher in 2027. The jurors for this year’s competition are SEAN STAROWITZ and ALPESH PATEL. The selected cohort of artists will work closely with the Director of Exhibitions in curating their work and exhibition-related programming.

    The Wind Challenge Exhibition Series is made possible thanks to generous support from the Wind Foundation.

  • Applicants are reviewed in a two-stage selection process:

    Round 1: Jurors review submitted artwork online. From this initial review, finalists selected to advance to the second round will be notified via e-mail or phone call by May 15, 2026.

    Round 2: Finalists deliver one original artwork to Fleisher the week of May 18, 2026, to be reviewed along with their original image submissions by the jurors. Installation artists being considered as finalists will be encouraged to come to Fleisher for a site visit if interested in submitting a specific proposal for the Fleisher galleries. The resulting round 2 submission could include a plan for the space and/or physical work related to the proposed installation). During this round the jurors will select 9 artists to be part of the Wind Challenge 2027. They will also assign the exhibiting spaces in our gallery (please note that there are three available spaces with different dimensions).

    FINAL NOTIFICATIONS to selected artists sent by Friday, June 12, 2026.

  • ALPESH KANTILAL PATEL is an associate professor of global contemporary art at Tyler School of Art and Architecture and was previously a curator at large at UrbanGlass, Brooklyn, where they organized a series of exhibitions under the theme, “Forever Becoming: Decolonization, Materiality, and Trans* Subjectivity.” They are the author of Multiple and One: Global Queer Art Histories, forthcoming from Manchester University Press and Productive Failure: Writing Queer Transnational South Asian Art Histories (2017); coeditor of the dossier ‘conceptualizing TRANS-ASIA’ for ASAP/Journal (2024), the anthology Storytellers of Art Histories (2022), and a special issue of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art (2021) commemorating Okwui Enwezor, among other publications. Grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, Loughborough University, Arts Council England, Cranbrook Academy of Art, and New York University have supported their research. They are associate editor of visual arts, architecture, and art history for ASAP/Journal and an editorial advisory board member of the Getty Research Journal.

    SEAN STAROWITZ Sean M. Starowitz has worked in a variety of community-based contexts, spanning more than a decade of socially engaged art practice. He uses archival research and public memory as material to reframe our current understanding of natural history and political imaginaries. Starowitz served as the Assistant Director of the Arts for the City of Bloomington, IN, during this time, he directed the 1% for the Arts program and managed cultural grants on behalf of the City. Prior to his work in local government, he was the artist-in-residence at the Farm To Market Bread Company in Kansas City and is a graduate of the Interdisciplinary Arts program at the Kansas City Art Institute. Starowitz has exhibited his work at Living Arts of Tulsa, KMAC Museum, and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as, numerous artist-run spaces. He has contributed writings to Proximity Magazine, Ruckus Journal and Belt Magazine. And has lectured at various universities throughout the US,  including Queens College, UCLA, Indiana University, University of South Dakota, SVA, and at American University in D.C.  In 2023, Starowitz received his MFA in Sculpture from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture. He currently lives and works in Philadelphia, PA, and spends his summers teaching at the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts in Lexington, KY.

    Sean Starowitz was a 2024 Wind Challenge Artist

    • Applicants must live within a 450-mile radius of Philadelphia.
    • Selected artists must not be showing the same major body of work in a local gallery or alternative space in the same year as the Wind Challenge exhibition.
    • Selected artists must be available to install their work, participate in the Wind Challenge Artist Exchange public program (a panel conversation led by the selected artists in which they ask each other questions and share insights into their creative process), and be present at the opening reception.

    Please note that students enrolled in a full-time degree/certificate granting program during the year of the exhibition and previous Wind Challenge artists are ineligible.

  • The Wind Challenge Exhibition Series will be held in the Dene M. Louchheim Galleries at Fleisher Art Memorial. The exhibitions are scheduled throughout the 2027 year and each exhibition will run approximately four-weeks. Exhibition dates will be disclosed to artists in JUNE 2026.

    • The opportunity to display recent work in a three-person exhibition.
    • The opportunity to work with Fleisher’s Director of Exhibitions in one of the country’s first community art centers, helping to curate their work in the selected gallery space.
    • $800 honorarium.
    • Opportunity to gain exposure and promote your practice through participation in the Wind Challenge Artist Exchange and public reception.
    • Promotion in Fleisher publications, online materials, and related marketing.
    • Optional: Opportunity to engage with Fleisher’s audience by creating a one-hour workshop. Please keep in mind that clearances are needed to engage with youth.

  • 11:59 pm on Sunday, April 26, 2026

    For more information about the Wind Challenge Exhibition Series, visit fleisher.org.

    Please direct inquiries to: Gerard Silva, Director of Exhibitions and Community Outreach at gsilva@fleisher.org

Apply to the 2027 Wind Challenge Exhibition

2026 Wind Challenge Series
Juried by Natalie Kuenzi and James Claiborne

For this series, nine selected artists will be featured in a trio of Wind Challenge Exhibitions—each featuring three artists—to be hosted at Fleisher in 2026. The jurors for this year’s competition are Natalie Kuenzi and James Claiborne. The selected cohort of artists will work closely with the Director of Exhibitions in curating their work and exhibition-related programming.

About the Wind Challenge

Established in 1978 as The Challenge and now known as the Wind Challenge, Fleisher’s annual juried competition is committed to featuring the work of exceptional artists living in the Philadelphia region. Since its inception, the series has supported the careers of hundreds of emerging artists and introduced their work to thousands of visitors. The Wind Challenge Exhibition Series is made possible thanks to generous support from the Dina Wind Art Foundation. In partnership with Fleisher, the Foundation has also premiered a digital archive of the 500+ artists who have participated in the Challenge since 1978, providing a comprehensive look at one of the most important and longest-running artist fellowships in the city.

2025 Wind Challenge Exhibition Series
Juried by Colette Fu and Heidi Ratanavanich

About the 2025 Wind Challenge Series Jurors

Colette Fu is a Philadelphia-based artist Colette Fu received her MFA in Fine Art Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2003 and soon after began devising complex compositions that incorporate photography and pop-up paper engineering. Her pop-up books are included in the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Getty Research Institute, Library of Congress, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and many private and rare archive collections. Fu’s numerous awards include a 2023 Artworks Grant, Joan Mitchell Artist and Sculptors Grant, the Meggendorfer Prize, and a Fulbright Research Fellowship to China. In 2017, Fu created a room-size pop-up book utilizing her own photographs entitled Tao Hua Yuan Ji, Source of the Peach Blossoms—a 21 x 14-foot pop-up book that people could enter—at the TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image. She teaches pop-up courses and community workshops internationally.

Colette was a Wind Challenge artist in the 2006-07 series.

Heidi Ratanavanich is a Thai/Chinese artist based in Lenapehoking (Philadelphia). They use print-making, food, and space-making to create works that provoke community learning, gathering, and remembering to imagine new collective possibilities. Their practice focuses on finding gaps to plug into in communities, to make art that feels necessary, scrappy, and joyful. They specialize in making physical and ephemeral objects that acknowledge and celebrate the labor and care of community-building.

Learn more about previous Wind Challenge artists, including Elizabeth Hamilton, Matthew Borgen, Kevin Huang, Jessica Curtaz, Yvonne Lung,  Melissa Joseph, Michael Konrad, and Natalie Kuenzi, in the YouTube series Fleisher from a Distance: Wind Challenge Edition.

Wind Challenges