The 2023 Small Stones Festival of the Arts is Now Closed

Thanks to all participating artists!

You can view all submissions in our Web Gallery, accessible in the menu link from this page.

As many of you already know, the Small Stones Festival of the Arts for 2023 had to be postponed due to storm damage at our venue, the Grafton Public Library. The Small Stones Festival will now be taking place from Saturday, January 27, 2024 through Sunday, February 4 at the Brigham Hill Community Barn in Grafton, Massachusetts. The Community Barn is a wonderfully restored event space located off of Wheeler Road. It is the perfect location for an art exhibition. Please see our main website for details. We want to thank everyone at the Grafton Public Library and the Brigham Hill Community Barn for their support!

Welcome to the art call site for the 2023 Small Stones Festival of the Arts. The Festival is a collaboration of the Worcester County Camera Club and the Blackstone Valley Art Association, now in our sixth year. This year our exhibition of fine art painting and photography will be held at a new location, the Brigham Hill Community Barn, North Grafton, Massachusetts.

Work chosen for the juried in-person exhibition as well as prize winning entries will be selected by an independent panel of distinguished jurors. Our photography jurors are Shane Gutierrez, Tom Nault and Ron Rosenstock. Our fine art painting jurors are Glenn Murray, Michael Rose and Kim Morin Weineck. You can read about them at our main web site, at the link below.

Art work exhibited at the Festival will be selected from approximately 500 submissions and will include over 140 fine art paintings (including drawing, sketches, ink and other 2D productions) and photographs (including film based, digital, infrared and alternative processes). Please note that we continue to have strict restrictions on the size of the work we can exhibit, as you'll see in the detailed entry instructions below. Works chosen for the exhibition will be published in our annual hardbound catalog - a tradition we're continuing this year. All submissions will appear in our Web Gallery, available on this site during and after the exhibition.

ART CALL CLOSED FOR THIS YEAR!

Submitting Your Work

You are invited to submit your original works of art for this exhibition through this website. Our jurors will select among the submitted entries to determine which to include in the exhibition and the printed exhibition catalog. Just prior to the opening of the exhibition, the jurors will also select prizewinners in the above categories.

Some Important Notes

There is a nonrefundable submission fee of $10 per entry.
Maximum of 4 entries per artist.
You must submit a high-quality photo of your work, suitable for inclusion in our show catalog — see below.
All entries are subject to our Terms and Conditions - READ THESE!
1. MAXIMUM SIZE: 26" on the longest edge - measure the FRAME, not the canvas/print. (We wish we could accommodate larger works, but this limitation is required by the size of our panels and our inability to hang work on the Library walls.)
2. Must have a HANGING WIRE - not a sawtooth or other type hanger.
3. You must HAND DELIVER and PICK UP your artwork in the allotted times - no shipping/receiving is possible.
4. THERE'S MORE - read the TERMS and CONDITIONS.

Photographing Your Work

All work submitted to the festival must be of publication quality, without reflections, abnormal color shifts, perspective distortions, etc. Not only will this help our jurors evaluate your work for their prize selections, but also will make the best presentation on the web and if your work is selected for our printed catalog.

Criteria include:

- Format: JPEG or PNG files accepted.
- Minimum Resolution: 1500 pixels total on longest edge.
- Maximum Resolution: 4800 pixels on longest edge.
- Pixels per Inch: Doesn’t matter – really.

If you are a photographer, this shouldn’t be a problem. If, however, you have paintings that you need to photograph, there’s an app for that: Google Photo Scan, available for iPhone/iPad or Android. This app guides you through taking a series of photos of your work, combines them, removes glare (from cover glass or reflections from varnish, etc.), and gives you a nice result. Just be certain your phone/tablet camera has sufficient resolution to meet the above requirement – an iPhone 6 probably will not, but a newer phone or tablet might be fine.

How to Register and Submit Your Work

In order to submit your work for the festival, you must register on this ArtCall site by clicking on the Register button in the header above (if you already have an ArtCall.org login, you can simply log in using the green Login button instead). If you have a narrow browser screen (mobile, etc.) you may have to click on the three horizontal lines in the upper RIGHT to see the buttons. Fill in the necessary information on the registration form and create a password.

Although there is no registration fee, there is a nonrefundable submission fee of $10 per submitted work. While you may submit up to four works, a maximum of three works will be accepted into the festival per artist.

To submit work to the exhibition:

IMPORTANT: Read the Terms and Conditions above for the festival.
Register or log in as described above.
From your user page ("My Submissions"), click on Purchase Submission Credits.
You'll see a payment screen where you can prepay for the number of works you will submit. Enter the required payment information to proceed.
You will now have credits in your account for the number of submissions for which you've paid. You can click on Add New Submission to enter the information for your first entry. Scrolling past the terms and conditions, fill out the fields for your entry, including category, subcategory, title, size (you can enter 0 for depth) and price (you can enter 0 if not for sale). If you wish to sell yiour work or call attention to your other artwork, BE SURE TO ENTER YOUR WEBSITE ADDRESS.
When you submit the information for your first entry, the next screen will prompt you to upload a photo of your entry (see criteria above).
When you have uploaded your photo, your first entry is complete and will appear on your user page. You can now continue with additional entries if you wish.