Anna Martine Whitehead
October 29 - November 20, 2022
Dalila Sanabria
December 3, 2022 - January 1, 2023
Eliza Fernand
Winter 2023
Peter Ronan + Cassie Tompkins
April 1 - April 30, 2023
Julia Klein
May 13 - June 11, 2023
Bimbola Akinbola
July 1 - July 30, 2023
Open Proposals
Have an idea for a project or community event you think would be a good fit at Roman Susan? Tell us who you are, what you do, and the experience you want to share at our space! Send a detailed outline in any format of your choice to proposals@romansusan.org.
Proposal review sessions occur following annual deadlines on June 10 and December 10. All proposals are considered for the next calendar year. Please see below for further proposal guidelines. We will hold info sessions about the proposal process this fall – on October 12 at 1224 W Loyola Ave and November 9 via Zoom.
Following the submission deadlines, all proposals are reviewed by community volunteers, and then selected by popular consensus among Roman Susan directors. Notification of the proposal status generally occurs within 50 days of the review deadlines. If you would be interested in volunteering to review incoming artist proposals in the future, please sign up at Proposal Review Volunteers.
In addition to full project proposals, Roman Susan currently has the following calls for artist participation: Annotations & Inserts in public library spaces; Land Acknowledgment Readers; installation and streetview Moving Image; and ongoing Mapping of the cultural spaces in the North Lakeside neighborhoods of Edgewater, Rogers Park, and Uptown in Chicago. You may also be interested in our list of other Chicagoland art spaces that accept artist proposals.
Roman Susan favors proposals which:
Share new work;
Engage our neighborhood;
Reflect communities in our immediate vicinity;
Showcase Chicago and Great Lakes artists;
Transform our space;
Promote open curatorial practices; and
Compliment our current trajectory.
Scheduling (rough estimates):
Exhibitions: 10 days setup + 30 days exhibition + 3 days deconstruct = 6 weeks
Short-run projects: 1-10 days setup + 1-2 event days + 2 days deconstruct = 2 weeks
One-nighters: 1-5 days setup + 1 event day + 1 day deconstruct =1 week
Project Honorariums:
Selected proposals receive honorariums, scaled to the duration of the project. Currently, for 2023:
Exhibitions = $1,000
Short-run = $600
One-night projects = $300
Visiting our space before preparing a proposal is strongly recommended. We reside in a corner storefront, 85 meters northwest of the Loyola Red Line CTA Station, with large south-facing windows, track lighting, a sunken floor from the street with blue-gray carpet, an irregular non-load bearing plaster ceiling, and almost no storage space. The building at 1224-1234 West Loyola was built in 1928 with boiler-controlled radiator heating; work that needs a climate controlled environment should not be proposed for this storefront location. Roman Susan welcomes proposals for collaborative projects at other locations as well – see romansusan.org/annex for past programming sites.
Below are additional materials for an idea of the storefront's spatial resources:
Floorplan (pdf) and 3D model (skp).