Mixtape No.5 will be another carefully curated artist-led online group show brought to you by Cultivate. The fifth and final Mixtape show and the final show of our 2023 Spring Season.

Mixtape No.5 will be another carefully curated artist-led online group show brought to you by Cultivate. Once again most of the artists will be directly invited but the open call element and hearing from artists we don’t know yet (or artists we haven't worked with for a little while) is very important to us. We'd like to hear from pro-active committed artists from all over the land and indeed the globe (you might like to note 24 of the artists in January 2022’s show Deflect came via the open call). We are very picky in terms of our shows, our door is always open though, new artistic blood is very important.

Mixtape No.5 will be the something like the 34th online exhibition from Cultivate and we think, if we’ve counted it right, the 187th Cultivate art exhibition or event in all.

Please read all of this, we know how long it is but it will save us all time. You’d be amazed at how many people don’t bother reading these things and just send us tedious photographs of red telephone boxes taken on their phone or pieces of digital/video art when we’ve clearly said that’s not what we want. Yes, we may invite a digital artist or a photographer we already know now and again, but we really do not want hundreds of submissions from photographers or video/digital/A.I artists (there are plenty of galleries that specialise in photography or digital art).

Mixtape No.5 will open online at 7pm on Tuesday April 25th, hosted once again on the Organ magazine website at www.organthing.com. Please do check out one or two of the recent previous online shows here to get a flavour of what we do and what we’re looking for, here's Mixtape No.4, do please take the time to have a look to get an idea.

Theme? There is no theme for there Mixtape exhibitions, we just want exciting engaging art that works in terms of an online group show.

Once again, as with the previous online shows, we are looking for exciting painters, installation artists, 3D artists, in fact Mixtape No.5 is open to artists of all disciplines besides photography or digital/video/A.I art (nothing against those disciplines and there are plenty of online outlets for those things). The one thing we really don’t want is a flat lifeless image of a painting, have a look at one of the last shows, go grab a flavour and a feel, make your image feel like a piece of art hanging on a gallery wall.  We had a lot of what you might call polite illustration last time, polite illustration is not really what we’re about. And and and, this is important, the images do have to work in terms of an online exhibition, badly taken shots of an instillation or your painting will not work for us however good the actual piece of art you've photographed is. 

If you wish to be considered for Mixtape No.5 then simply submit no more than five images  with titles and a link to your artist website. The minimum requirement for this online show is that you have a working, well maintained up-to-date artist website that we can link to so people can find out more about you – a working website mind you, not just a Facebook page or an instagram account that's full of photos from your last birthday party or what your cat had for dinner today or heaven forbid one of those dreadful Saatchi pages, (an Instagram page that is mostly focused on your art or a Facebook Artist page is more than fine).

The call is open to anyone from anywhere on the planet. There are no fees or costs involved, we’re not paying anything in terms of physical gallery rents and such for this one so why would we even dream of charging our fellow artists just to open an email and host something on our website? Some galleries or curators or indeed some of our fellow artists might think the practice of charging a fee is okay and exploiting artists like that is fine, we detest the practice.  Sure, there’s a fair bit of our time involved but hey, we really really (really) don’t like galleries who charge for just opening an email and then claim it to be admin costs, but why should anyone ever pay to submit to a show they’re might not even get to take part in?! 

All we ask from you, and this is an important bit, all we ask is that if you are selected or invited that you put up links and proactively share details on your own websites and properly on your social media feeds, a little more than just an annoying waste of time 24 hour “story” in Instagram. We expect you to post news and links properly (frankly if you don’t share the link and carry the news on your art pages then you won’t be asked back, I think that’s fair, we will check and if you didn’t bother last time then why should we ask you back when you submit again this time? We have said no to returning artists who couldn’t be bothered to share, we do check before inviting someone back or when as artist makes a second submission having been in a previous show).

If you wish to submit to Mixtape No.5 then please do. Once you have, we promise to get back as soon as we can, usually within four or five working days (probably faster, although sometimes we need to wait and see where the show is going and if you fit). We will get back with a yes or no, if it is a yes we’ll come back and ask for all the details we need, if it is a no then we will try and take the time to tell you why, as artists ourselves there’s nothing we hate more than a rude cut ‘n paste cold-hearted rejection.

Deadline is end of day Sunday 16th April. Don’t be leaving it until the last minute though, you have more chance if you don’t leave it to the very last minute and the rush from everyone else. We have put this call up a good few weeks ahead of the deadline, hopefully that gives you plenty of time to react.

Once again the show is being curated by the Cultivate team of Sean Worrall and Emma Harvey. We are first and foremost working artists. We opened Cultivate because we really didn’t like the often very cynical way most galleries were treating us as artists, we like to be treated the way you as artists expect to be treated. Cultivate is an artist-led thing, please leave any attitude, including those art school attitudes outside the front door.

We are very much about letting people in but we are very very picky, if we say no, we will politely tell you why rather than just sending you a standard cut'n copy rejection. If we say no, it is mostly a reflection of our personal tastes – first, above all else, we need to feel what you do is right for this group show and that being part of the show is right for both you and us, some art really works in an online context, some art simply doesn’t, some art works for Cultivate, some doesn't.

Please note: These exhibitions are not about selling, we are not interested in prices or commissions. If people are interested in your work they are encouraged to connect with you directly.

One more thing, we have noticed some people have a habit of submitting the same piece of art as the art we rejected last time, please don’t.  There’s one guy who submits the same painting to every call we ever put up here, we keep telling him why we’re saying no, we’ll probably just hit the delete button for him this time, there are only so many hours in the day.

Thanks for reading all this, we look forward to hearing from you. sorry if some of it sounds heavy handed, we’re just trying to explain things…