Open Call for Artists –
One Hundred Views of Neighborhood Cats
South Shore Arts
Deadline to submit: Friday, December 4, 2026, by 5pm
South Shore Arts will be hosting an exhibition, 100 Views of Neighborhood Cats, inspired by the theme of “cats,” from January 15 through March 2027. All mediums are welcome. If you would like to be considered for this exhibition, please visit:
https://www.southshoreartsonline.org/100viewsofcats
If you have any questions about submitting work or the exhibition as a whole, please reach out to Brandon Johnson at brandon@southshoreartsonline.org.
About the Exhibition
For art lovers, it rarely takes long to encounter a cat tucked into the margins of art history. For museum-goers they appear in art from different cultures spanning millennia. Even before crossing the threshold of the Art Institute of Chicago, one is greeted by the institution’s most recognizable sentinels, two bronze lions standing with a composure that is, in equal parts, proud and threatening. After all, they have served as guardians for more than 100 years. Inside, the feline presence only multiplies, as lions and tigers stalk the edges of canvases, cast as adversaries to saints, gladiators, and kings, or elevated to symbolic emissaries in ancient and mythic worlds. Whether some nine thousand years ago in Neolithic Cyprus, or locally in the most contemporary of Contemporary Art, artists turn again and again to the image of the cat—alert, inscrutable, and persistently nearby.
100 Views of Neighborhood Cats continues this long-standing fascination, though with a distinctly modern inflection. The exhibition gathers a lively and eclectic group of local and established artists, each attuned to the peculiar charisma of their feline companion. Across painting, printmaking, and mixed media, cats appear in states of watchful stillness, comic suspicion, and domestic ease. The cat is a profoundly personal motif for each of the artists—possibly an intimate companion since childhood, certainy a silent witness to the many stages of life. The ineffable emotions stirred through this bond form the very foundation of both this exhibition and these artists’ creative expression.
The exhibition’s title alludes to the serial logic of Japanese woodblock prints from the Edo period (1600-1868), most famously Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji and The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, in which repetition becomes a form of meditation. Cats, co-incidentally, populate many of these prints, slipping between scenes with the same self-possession they bring to contemporary life. In this exhibition, the neighborhood cat assumes that legacy with ease. It is at once subject and accomplice, muse and mild antagonist,and, by turns, affectionate and wry. Visitors are invited to reconsider the familiar—to notice the way a cat holds a gaze, occupies a threshold, or vanishes just as it is observed.
Auguste Renoir, Portrait of Julie Manet, oil on canvas, 1887