Beloved Community announces Open Call for The Art of Labour: The Infrastructure of Care
Philadelphia, 2026
(New Orleans) For the final city in The Art of Labour series, Beloved Community invites artists across Greater Philadelphia to reflect on The Art of Labour: The Infrastructure of Care — where work is not mere transactional employment, but an act of community building, survival, and social justice. Rooted in Beloved Community’s core value—Create with Abundance—this exhibition asks:
What does it look like to value care as civic infrastructure? How do invisible, unconventional, and intergenerational forms of labor shape the social fabric of our neighborhoods?
Submission & Eligibility
Eligibility: Open to visual artists, social practice practitioners, fiber artists, interdisciplinary makers, and performance creators based in the Greater Philadelphia region.
Mediums Accepted: All visual and spatial media, including sculpture, textile, installation, video, sound, mixed-media, and social practice documentation. Unconventional, tactile, and community-engaged mediums are strongly encouraged.
Selected Artists Will Receive: Inclusion in an exclusive one-night exhibition and private dinner with curators, collectors, and community advocates, as well as feature coverage across Beloved Community platforms.
Click here to learn more about the Closed Call and submit.
Call for Artists Opens: October 1st, 2026
Application Deadline: October 19th, 2026
Artist Notification: October 31st, 2026
Artwork Drop-Off: November 20th - 21st, 2026
Exhibition & Artist Talk Dinner: November 21st, 2026
Pick-Up for Unsold Works: Evening of November 21st - Morning of November 22nd, 2026
About The Art of Labour
Launching in three cities throughout 2026, the Beloved Community Artist Talk Series centers visionary artists whose work explores themes of labour, work, value, sustainability, and contemporary life. Each event is designed as both an exhibition and a meaningful cultural exchange. Creating space for artists to share not only their work, but the ideas, stories, and lived experiences behind their practice.
Philadelphia is a city forged by hands often left unacknowledged in historical archives. From its historic textile mills and industrial corridors to the rowhouses where generations of mothers, grandmothers, and early educators raise the city’s youth, labor has always been the heartbeat of our communities. Yet, the most vital labor—the work of care, early learning, language translation, and community stewardship—remains largely invisible within traditional economic systems.
The selected artists will present a cohesive body of work within an intimate exhibition environment intentionally designed to foster dialogue, visibility, sales, and meaningful engagement. Throughout the evening, artists will participate in conversations with guests, sharing insights into their creative process, relationship to the exhibition theme, and interpretation of labor as both inheritance and responsibility.
About Curations by TGTC
Dr. Brooke E. Wyatt is an arts advocate, independent curator, data scientist, and epidemiologist whose interdisciplinary practice explores culture, equity, memory, and community storytelling. As a trained Data Scientist and Epidemiologist, she blends research, anthropology, and socially engaged art to create spaces for dialogue and collective healing.
Over the past three years, Dr. Wyatt has curated nine exhibitions centered on storytelling and memory, She has served as a reviewer for the Arts New Orleans Civic Fellowship, a juror for the 2025 New Orleans Percent for Art – District Chambers commission and currently serves as a juror for the 2026 Creative Capital Grant. Dr. Wyatt also serves on the board of KIDsmART, where she chairs the Academic Committee. Through her creative consultancy, Dr. Wyatt works with artists across a range of domains from curatorial support to strategic development and sustainable practices.
About Beloved Community
Beloved Community is a New Orleans-based nonprofit that works on sustainable solutions for racial and economic equity. Beloved leverages two mutually-reinforcing bodies of work: capacity-building for leaders in education and workforce sectors and community-engaged research. The Art of Labour is an extension of Beloved’s work on good jobs and invites artists, collectors, and curators to lean into prescient discourse about contemporary labor issues.
Please subscribe to the Beloved Community newsletter for future open calls and announcements and follow on Instagram @WeAreBeloved_US and LinkedIn Beloved-Community-US
