Go to Eastside Gallery
Eastside Gallery has a record number of open calls for artists right now – which is an amazing opportunity for anyone wanting to show their work.
The gallery is inviting Canterbury artists to contribute to the following exhibitions:
“Reflecting and Refracting”
Artists are invited to explore the ways we echo, mirror, turn inwards, or distort, bend and reshape what we see. Whether through formal composition or metaphor, the theme may evoke juxtapositions such as truth and distortion, clarity and transformation, stillness and motion, surface and depth. Artists are encouraged to interpret the theme in any way they like and in any medium.
Register by: 12 January 2026
Exhibition Dates: 3-28 February 2026
The first in our “Artist Development” series for 2026 (First Steps – Stride by Stride – Momentum ’26). This is an annual showcase for artists who are new, or nearly new, to exhibiting. There is a 3x limit to exhibiting in this show.
Register by: 28 January 2026
Exhibition dates: 3-28 March 2026
Why does making art make you feel alive?
This exhibition proposes art as a way of living – urgent, embodied, essential.
Eastside Gallery invites submissions from artists who create because they have to – art as a daily insistence, a vital compulsion, a way staying present and staying human.
Whether it’s painting, sculpture, photography, moving image, or something else entirely – we want to see what drives you.
We’re not looking for polite or polished detachment. We want the work that keeps you up at night. The pieces that come from the depths and heights of anger, joy, terror, awe and obsession. The works you make to make your-self.
Register by: 25 February 2026
Exhibition dates: 31 March – 24 April 2026
The second show in our “Artist Development” series (First Steps – Stride by Stride – Momentum ’26). This is an annual showcase for artists with a moderate amount of exhibition experience. There is a 3x limit to exhibiting in this show.
Register by: 25 March 2026
Exhibition dates: 28 April – 23 May 2026
Unreal Canterbury conjures a region both enchanted and estranged – welcoming fantasy, evoking the slang sense of awe, and hinting at a darker undercurrent: a Canterbury where authenticity feels unstable, or that something essential may be slipping. Artists are invited to engage with any or all of these ideas—or let the theme spark entirely new ones. The freedom is yours.
Register by: 22 April 2026
Exhibition dates: 26 May – 20 June 2026
This exhibition opens a wide field of inquiry where light and depth may be treated either as technical concern or conceptual provocation – formal, metaphorical, emotional, and perceptual.
Artists are encouraged to engage with the theme freely: some may explore the formal properties of high-contrast light and shadow, while others might approach it metaphorically – as a tension between surface and interiority, the frivolous and the meaningful, visibility and concealment. Still others may find resonance in entirely different registers and are welcome to do so.
Register by: 17 June 2026
Exhibition dates: 21 July – 15 August 2026
Eastside Gallery’s top show for the year, Momentum is designed for artists who are actively committed to developing their art practice and who have substantial, or substantive, exhibition experience in curated shows.
Register by: 5 August 2026
Exhibition dates: 8 September – 3 October 2026
“Good Trouble”
Coined during the Civil Rights era and echoed through the Black Lives Matter movement, the call to “make good trouble” originated as a rallying cry for the kind of resistance that sparks transformation. It’s a phrase charged with urgency, imagination, and the belief that disruption can be a force for good.
This exhibition expands the frame – inviting artists to interpret what good trouble means to them. We welcome the mischievous, the cathartic, the speculative and the radical. Stir gently or shake hard.
Register by: 2 September 2026
Exhibition dates: 6 – 31 October 2026
Artists can download contributor forms directly from Eastside’s website here.