AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

from Franklin Furnace

Art in Odd Places 2026: UTOPIAS

SENSE | DREAM | BODY | CARE | CONNECT

ART IN ODD PLACES ANNOUNCES

OPEN CALL FOR PROPOSALS

Deadline April 21, 11:59pm EST

IMMEDIATE RELEASE, March 21, 2026. New York City. Art in Odd Places (AiOP) 2026: UTOPIAS, the 21st edition of Art in Odd Places, curated by Arantxa Araujo & Pancho López, scheduled for September 26th & 27th, 12pm-5pm on 14th Street, NYC invites proposals that inhabit the city not as it is, but as it could be—transforming 14th Street into a living laboratory for collective dreams, radical care, and shared futures, as this festival has been doing for over two decades.

We invite individual artists and collectives to propose projects for this outdoor public visual and performance art festival taking place in New York City. We welcome projects that use installations, performance, actions, gestures, sound, and participatory practices to activate public space and spark imagination. We encourage artists to create situations where audiences can listen, participate, and reflect—where complexity becomes felt, and dialogue can emerge. Whether through solo works or collaborative interventions, we seek projects that propose speculative infrastructures for care, refusal, joy, and mutual recognition—projects that invite passersby into acts of listening, resting, mourning, celebration, or play.

What does it mean to imagine otherwise—together, in public? What happens when we treat the street not as a corridor of consumption or control, but as a commons: a site for experimentation, mutual recognition, and collective dreaming? In a time when public space is increasingly regulated, monetized, and surveilled, AiOP 2026: UTOPIAS asks: How might temporary gestures—ephemeral performances, improvised gatherings, fleeting apparitions—rehearse more just, joyful, and imaginative ways of existing and communing together?

New York City is a place built by arrivals. Generations of migrants and immigrants have carried languages, rituals, and memories that continually rewrite the city’s possibilities. AiOP 2026: UTOPIAS recognizes NYC as a living archive of radical thinking, where people from all over the world co-think, co-resist, and co-create in the face of precarity and displacement. Rather than smoothing over differences, this project leans into the frictions and overlaps of urban life—those moments when cultures touch, (mis)align, and transform one another. As returning artist Yali Ramagoza reflects, “Art in Odd Places creates a rare moment where everyday life is interrupted and the street becomes a space to imagine other possibilities—perhaps even utopian ones.” Ramagoza, who first participated in the festival in 2018, returns this year alongside invited artists such as Ayana Evans and LuluLolo, marking a new phase in her practice and continuing a lineage of performance as critical engagement in public space.

About the Festival

AiOP 2026: UTOPIAS (September 26 & 27, 2026) is an immersive public art initiative that encourages artists to explore how unconventional art spaces can ignite imagination and foster community engagement. We seek innovative installations, performances, and interactive works that challenge traditional boundaries and inspire collective dreaming.

Performances and installations will unfold over two days, from 12pm to 5pm, across two sections of 14th Street:

Saturday, September 26: 14th Street between First and Third Avenues

Sunday, September 27: 14th Street between Sixth and Eighth Avenues

Half of the participating artists will present each day, creating a two-day festival choreographed collectively by all artists.

Throughout the festival, the city becomes both stage and collaborator: sidewalks become rehearsal rooms, lampposts and stoops become altars, traffic noise becomes a score, and the street becomes a playground for participation. AiOP 2026: UTOPIAS invites visitors to move slowly, to notice how even the smallest actions can momentarily shift what feels possible. In these shared intervals of time, public space is reclaimed as a commons. AiOP 2026: UTOPIAS is dedicated to Franklin Furnace, honoring their 50th anniversary.

We invite artists from all backgrounds and disciplines to apply. Please see the application materials on our website artinoddplaces.org or go directly to the application form here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe6a638DK074lpHoU5IfhzPCpRs6bia...

About the Curators

Arantxa Araujo and Pancho López are Mexican performance artists whose practices explore how performance can create spaces for reflection, encounter, and collective imagination. Working between Mexico City and New York, Araujo creates immersive participatory experiences that draw from ritual, neuroscience, and shared presence to explore how our biological, social, and emotional bodies move together. López’s work engages everyday life and the emotional dimensions of human experience, transforming ordinary gestures into artistic expression. Together, as co-curators, they bring a shared interest in performance as a tool for gathering, experimentation, and imagining new possibilities. As Araujo notes, “AiOP 2026: UTOPIAS is the perfect laboratory to ideate and construct the worlds we want to see and imagine. We practice in this fertile terrain in order to extend these performative strategies into the world—may our practices remain offerings and invitations for collective worldmaking.”

About Art in Odd Places

Art in Odd Places aims to stretch the boundaries of communication in the public realm by presenting artworks in all disciplines outside the confines of traditional public space regulations. AiOP reminds us that public spaces function as the epicenter for diverse social interactions and the unfettered exchange of ideas.