The San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles has announced an open call for a juried exhibition marking its 50th anniversary in 2027. Titled 'The Next 50: A Bay Area Textile Open,' the project invites artists from the wider Bay Area to submit textile works for a show themed 'Joy, Innovation, and the Next Fifty Years.' According to the museum, the exhibition is intended to survey the breadth of textile practice today while imagining where the field may go next.
The call positions textile art as a central part of the museum’s history. The institution says that since its founding in 1977, it has championed fiber, cloth, thread, quilt, and textile-based practices as contemporary art, helping create space for artists working through material, pattern, structure, stitch, surface, and process. The anniversary exhibition extends that mission by asking artists to respond to the present moment through work that engages both tradition and experimentation.
The museum’s announcement frames the project around a set of broad questions about the current state of textile art: what forms, ideas, materials, traditions, and experiments are shaping the next 50 years, and how artists are using textile practices to consider joy, resilience, identity, place, community, resistance, beauty, labor, memory, and transformation. In the newsletter introducing the open call, the museum described the exhibition as looking at the present “as a way of imagining the future.”
The theme of joy is presented as expansive rather than simple. The museum says it is interested in work where joy can be complex, hard-won, defiant, intimate, political, communal, or deeply personal, and where it may emerge through making, repair, memory, experimentation, inheritance, beauty, or acts of care. Artists are encouraged to interpret “textile” broadly while maintaining a clear material, conceptual, or process-based relationship to textile practice.
Eligibility is limited to artists living in the Bay Area and surrounding region, including San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Solano, Sonoma, Santa Cruz, San Benito, Napa, and Monterey counties. Artists at all career stages may apply, and the museum says it welcomes submissions from traditional, contemporary, experimental, community-based, and interdisciplinary textile practices. Eligible media include quilting, weaving, knitting, crochet, embroidery, felting, surface design, basketry, textile collage, soft sculpture, beadwork, wearable or garment-based work, fiber installation, and mixed-media work in which textile structure is a primary component.
Artists may submit up to two works, and there is no entry fee. The exhibition will be selected by a jury with expertise in textile art, fiber practice, craft, contemporary art, and/or curatorial work, which will consider artistic strength, craftsmanship, relation to the theme, and installation feasibility. The museum will not offer works for sale through the exhibition. Accepted artists must deliver or ship work ready to install, and quilts should have a four-inch-wide sleeve sewn to the back along the top edge.
Key dates are set around the turn of the year and into spring 2027. The submission deadline is January 1, 2027, with jury review in January and notification of acceptance on February 8. The artwork delivery and shipping window falls in March, with exact dates to be announced, with the exhibition itself set for April 2027. The opening reception has not yet been announced.
