The Arts Center, in Orange, VA invites submissions for How to Hold Time: a juried group exhibition exploring time as convergence, duration, and lived experience.
For later career artists, age 65+. June 4 through July 31, 2027. Up to $3500 in awards.
Centered on artists who have sustained their practices beyond the age of 65, the exhibition understands duration not as decline, but as density. These artists work within time as material: accumulating, shedding, returning. Their practices reveal that experience does not resolve into clarity—it deepens complexity.
In this space, time is not measured chronologically but sensorially and ethically: in attention, in repetition, in the courage to remain present. The exhibition becomes a field of simultaneity, where works encounter one another like currents—overlapping, resisting, and briefly joining.
How to Hold Time takes its conceptual ground from Pablo Neruda’s vision of time as two opposing currents: one carrying the weight of all that has been lived, the other exposing the unfolding present. For a fleeting instant, these currents meet—and it is within that charged convergence that this exhibition exists.
The works gathered here do not attempt to illustrate Neruda’s poem. Instead, they inhabit its condition. Each piece occupies the fragile interval where memory and immediacy collide—where time is not linear, but folded, layered, and alive.
Artists should engage with time as described by Pablo Neruda in one of his Elemental Odes, not as a linear passage, but as a meeting of forces:
Memory and immediacy
Past and unfolding present
Erosion and revelation
We are interested in work that inhabits the moment where these currents converge.
Artists are not asked to illustrate Neruda, but to respond to the condition his poem describes.
There will be a Best in Show award of $1000.00, and 1st Prize - $650, 2nd Prize - $350, 3rd Prize - $200, and three Juror’s Choice winners of $100/each
Eligibility
Artists must be 65 years of age or older
Demonstrated ongoing and active creative practice
Open to local, national, and international artists
Accepted Media
All media are welcome, including:
Painting
Sculpture
Photography
Installation
Video
Textile and interdisciplinary practices
Submission Guidelines
5–10 images or time-based samples of recent work
Artist statement (300–500 words)
CV or short biography highlighting continued practice
Optional reflection on time in your work
$20 submission fee – paid on website
Email submissions on artscenterinorange.com under Calls, to submissions@artscenterinorange.com
Put “How to Hold Time” In the subject line.
Deadline for submissions: February 26, 2027
What We Seek
Work that holds time rather than represents it
Practices shaped by duration, persistence, and transformation
Pieces that create tension between memory and immediacy
Art that exists in the “joining of the two rivers.”
Exhibition Vision
Selected works will form an immersive environment where time is experienced as layered, unstable, and shared. The exhibition will include public programming—poetry, performance, and conversation—that will expand the gallery into a living, temporal space.
We invite you to share how you have stood in time—and how time continues to move through you.
In one of his “Elemental Odes,” Pablo Neruda laid out an explicit instruction for how to hold time:
Listen and learn.
Time
is divided
into two rivers:
one
flows backward, devouring
life already lived;
the other
moves forward with you
exposing
your life.
For a single second
they may be joined.
Now.
This is that moment,
the drop of an instant
that washes away the past.
It is the present.
It is in your hands.
Racing, slipping,
tumbling like a waterfall.
But it is yours.
Help it grow
with love, with firmness,
with stone and flight,
with resounding
rectitude,
with purest grains,
the most brilliant metal
from your heart,
walking
in the full light of day
without fear
of truth, goodness, justice,
companions of song,
time that flows
will have the shape
and sound
of a guitar,
and when you want
to bow to the past,
the singing spring of
transparent time
will reveal your wholeness.
Time is joy.