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.

Applications for the 2026 Wind Challenge Series closed on Sunday, April 28. Applicants selected to move forward in the process will be contacted directly.

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.

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.