Backwards/Forwards: A Call for Handmade Prints

Backwards/Forwards invites artists to submit handmade prints that consider time as material, memory, pressure, inheritance, repetition, rupture, and possibility. Time may be experienced as linear, circular, layered, transparent, opaque, fragmented, geological, ancestral, intimate, political, or otherworldly. This exhibition asks artists to look both backward and forward: toward histories that shape us, futures we imagine or fear, and the present moment where those forces meet.
 

As artists, how do we come to terms with our cultural past? What do we inherit, repeat, revise, resist, or transform? How do personal and collective histories surface through mark, matrix, impression, edition, erasure, pressure, layering, and touch?
 

Possible Approaches:
• Memory, ancestry, archive, family history, migration, or cultural inheritance
• Environmental time, extinction, regeneration, seasons, land, weather, or geological change
• The body over time: aging, healing, loss, endurance, repetition, ritual, or care
• Political and social histories that continue to shape the present
• Speculative futures, imagined worlds, warning signs, hopes, omens, or portals
• Print processes that reveal sequence, layering, reversal, pressure, transfer, or trace
 

Submission Requirements
All entries must be handmade prints created by the artist using traditional printmaking and/or photographic processes and produced within the last 5 years.  3D and experimental work is encouraged. Any combination of processes may be employed including but not limited to silkscreen, letterpress, calligraphy, etching, woodcut, lithography, linocut, drypoint, mezzotint, monoprint, polymer plates, silver gelatin prints, photopolymer gravure, copperplate gravure, cyanotype, vandyke, gumbichromate, palladium, platinum, carbon, salt, chemigram, lumen, argrotype, oilprint, chlorophyll, instant transfers, and lifts. 
Digital processes may be included when they are meaningfully integrated with handmade printmaking methods. AI-generated and purely digital prints are not eligible. 

Work needs to arrive at the gallery ready to hang, but framing is not required. Magnets, clips, and other methods can be used.  
 

Location: Light Art Space
209 West Broadway, Silver City, NM 88061 https://lightartspace.com/
 

2026 Timeline

October 8th – November 7th, 2026 - Exhibition Dates

September 13th, 2026, midnight Mountain Time - Submission Deadline  

September 16th - Notification of accepted entries  

 September 30th - Accepted works must be received 

October 8th -  Backwards/Forewards opens 

October 9th, 5 - 7 pm - Public Reception 

October 9th - 12th  - Southwest Print Fiesta 

November 7th – Exhibition closes

November 9th - 13th - Return shipment of unsold work

Juror Biography: 

Terran J. Last Gun, Saakwaynaamah’kaa (Last Gun), (b. 1989, Browning, MT) is an enrolled Piikani citizen and visual artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Piikani Nation (Spotted Robes) of Montana, also called the Blackfeet or Amskapi Piikani (Southern), are one of the four nations that comprise the Siksikaitsitapi (Blackfoot Confederacy; Siksika, Kainai, Piikani or Apatohsi Piikani (Northern) nations are each located in Alberta, Canada) and are collectively known as the Blackfoot People or Niitsitapi (Real People). Born and raised on the Blackfeet Reservation, Last Gun’s work centers around the process of color exploration and visual documentation of nature, cosmos, cultural narratives, and personal experiences. Often employing geometric aesthetics, he is contributing to an ancient Niitsitapi North American narrative.
He has exhibited at venues including the SITE Santa Fe (Santa Fe, NM), IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (Santa Fe, NM), Glacier Art Museum (Kalispell, MT), Missoula Art Museum (Missoula, MT), Bates Museum of Art (Lewiston, ME), Newberry Library (Chicago, IL), Museum of the Plains Indian (Browning, MT), Contemporary at Blue Star (San Antonio, TX), Zimmerli Art Museum (New Brunswick, NJ), and the Anderson Ranch Arts Center (Snowmass Village, CO) among others. 
Last Gun received his BFA in Museum Studies and AFA in Studio Arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2016. He has received awards from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation 2024 Biennial Award, First Peoples Fund 2020 Artist in Business Leadership Fellowship, and the Santa Fe Art Institute 2018 Story Maps Fellowship. Last Gun was named one of the 2022 12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now in Southwest Contemporary, and most recently was named one of the Art in America 2026 New Talent 20 Artists to Watch.