2027 Open Call Winner and Finalists

Open Source Gallery is pleased to announce our 2027 selected artist through our annual open call. This year we received nearly 200 applications from artists around the world. Our jurors, Marlene Hausegger and Juan Pablo Plazas, carefully considered each submission and selected Stephanie J. Woods for a solo exhibition in 2027.

Stephanie J. Woods

Stephanie J. Woods is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she serves as an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Art at the University of New Mexico. Raised in Charlotte, North Carolina, Woods creates work deeply rooted in the preservation and celebration of her cultural heritage. 

Her practice spans installation, sculpture, video, photography, and sound, often merging these elements to create immersive spaces. Within these installations, material operates as both medium and message. Woods employs culturally resonant substances such as gourds grown in her mother’s garden, okra, rice, watermelon, and her own hair to construct narratives of place, memory, and ancestry. 

She earned her MFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2015 and has since built a dynamic career. In 2021, Woods was selected for the Black Rock Senegal artist residency in Dakar, Senegal, and that same year, she was honored with the 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art by the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina. Woods has been awarded several other prestigious residencies and fellowships, including the Harpo Prize, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts Residency, the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship, and the ACRE Residency. She has also spent time at the McColl Center for Art + Innovation, Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists Residency, and the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, among others. 

Her work has been featured in major exhibitions, including at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery as part of Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today, and the Dakar Biennale. Additionally, Woods’ work is held in the permanent collections of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Gibbes Museum of Art, and the Mint Museum, among others.

Above Image: Never Quite, Sweet Enough I (2025). Black porcelain, slip-cast seeded watermelon, braided synthetic hair, foam floor tiles, laser- engraved etching of family home in Seneca, SC, and digitally scanned fig leaf cut-outs from the artist’s mother’s garden. Ceiling Sculpture: 120″ X 8” X 7”, Floor Sculpture.

The watermelon represents, freedom, community, celebration, land ownership, and self-determination. A fruit used by Black Americans to enact and celebrate our freedom after emancipation. “Never Quite, Sweet Enough I” reclaims the watermelon, pays homage to this fruit, and pays homage to West African rice farmers who, during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, braided seeds and grains into their hair as acts cultural survival. Okra seeds, watermelon seeds, and other crops were also believed to be carried this way. Thus, turning hair into a vessel, and lifeline.

we making gumbo? (2023): During the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, West African rice farmers braided rice seeds into their hair as a means of preserving their culture and ensuring survival. Okra seeds were also believed to be braided into the hair. During my residency at Black Rock, Senegal, while learning to cook Supa Kanja, a traditional Senegalese dish, I asked, “we makin’ gumbo?” The cook held up a piece of okra, locally known as ki ngombo or gumbo in West Africa. Growing up, I frequently enjoyed okra and the dish gumbo, often harvested from my mother’s garden. The hanging sculpture is displayed like a curtain on a custom fabricated post and lintel structure resembling a portal.

your destination is in a different time zone and Carolina Gold (2023):

I started calling these works moving audio photographs because they are essentially videos capturing a still photograph while everything else around the figure is moving. In this case, the water, clouds, and birds move while the figure floats adrift, looking over the Atlantic Ocean.

your destination is in a different time zone (projection). Moving audio photography, 3 minutes 58 second loop.

Videography: Stephanie J. Woods
Sound: Johannes Barfield
Poetry: Laura Neal

Our 2027 Open Call Hot Picks:

Our jurors, also selected four finalists from over 150 applications for our Open Call for 2027 Exhibitions: Gabrielle Constantine, Bhen Alan, Esther Marveta Neff, and Katarina Jerinic.

Gabrielle Constantine

“The Condition of a Bitter Tongue and Souring Skin”, 2024, leather, found trellis, found wooden tray,pipe cleaners, grout, liquid nails, fabric, buttons, carpet, dried lemons from Natalies tree in Los Angeles, foam, fruit mesh, handkerchief, grommets, green plastic, 58″ x 23″

Giving fake Tiffany, bought from the trunk of a Cadillac, to Rachel Cohen for her Bat Mitzvah. Microwaving lavash and string cheese for an after-school snack. Tending to a mustache and beard since 5th grade. Going to the AC Tropicana for weekend “getaways”. Watching Cher in Moonstruck every night before bed. Drinking milk from a martini glass. This is Constantine’s DNA. Gabrielle Constantine (1994) was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she received her double BFA in Sculpture and Fibers and Material studies at the Tyler School of Art (2017) and holds an MFA at The University of Texas of Austin (2023) . Growing up in an Armenian Community and the restaurant industry has inexplicably informed her material, linguistic, and performative decisions surrounding her sculptures, installations, and gatherings. Constantine’s held different residencies such as Lighthouse Works(2025), RAIR (2025), Bemis Center (2024), Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2024), The Leroy Neiman Fellow at Oxbow school of art (2023), and SOMA summer (2022) Alongside her more sculptural practice, Constantine has shared in cooking dinners and hosting gatherings with communities all over the country and internationally. She is constantly and continually brainstorming ways of merging food and art together.

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Bhen Alan

Why Does My Adobo Taste Different?, 2025, 27 feet by 10 feet, Woven mats, woven hats, woven fans, barong, grass, woven paintings, woven rattan, bamboo, wooden cooking spoons, terra cotta pots, woven baskets. Installation at Syracuse University Art Museum, Syracuse, New York.

Weaving, in the context of diaspora, functions as more than a craft; it operates as a language of survival, adaptation, and belonging. For those uprooted from their homelands, weaving becomes a means of navigating identity, embodying the tensions inherent in migration. Through themes of camouflage, shapeshifting, protection, and survival, weaving emerges as a symbol of resilience in the face of displacement. Shaped by Bhen Alan’s journey from the Philippines to Canada and later to the United States, weaving is understood as a form of communication – one that requires a careful balance between warp and weft, between holding on and letting go. Alan often weaves with his body as a loom, engaging movement, memory, and touch as acts of translation. Food functions as a parallel language within his art practice – one of care, memory, and continuity. Through cooking and shared meals, food becomes a material of survival and intimacy, carrying embodied knowledge across generations and geographies.

Bhen Alan received his BFA from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in 2019 and his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2022. He was a Fulbright Scholar from 2022–2023, during which time he traveled to the Philippines to conduct research and fieldwork on indigenous mat-making practices across multiple communities and provinces.

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Esther Marveta Neff

Neff (Esther Marveta, they/them) struggles with ontologies and contravenes in colonial-modern cosmologies, making “operas of operations” as/with flexible collective embodiment, PPL. Neff/PPL’s processes and performances take forms of research, installation, experiment, ritual, thinktank, co-op, and cult, discarding dichotomies between “art,” “philosophy,” and “science,” seeking embarrassing, utopian, and metaphysical muscular and musical bonding that honors neurodiversity, collective consciousness, and care. Some parts of the body are flapping, is that funny to you? Some activities have resulted in detailed diagrams, will that be helpful to anyone? Interrelated visions have advised: 1) there will be no such thing as “art” after the revolution, 2) everything will be “art” after the revolution.

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Katarina Jerinic

Katarina Jerinic makes work about the landscape found on streets and sidewalks. She approaches the built environment with curiosity, humor and awe, making connections between things found there and ways we study the landscape–like geography, astronomy, geology, and botany. Her projects in varying media have been presented both indoors and out, including in solo exhibitions at The Ovid Gallery, Pine Hill, NY (2024); SPACES, Cleveland, OH (2020); Baxter St at CCNY, New York (2018); Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, University of Nevada Las Vegas (2017); along the Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn, NY (2017) in a project supported by NYC Department of Transportation Art Program and community partners; and at an exit ramp off the Brooklyn Queens Expressway which she transformed into an earthwork (2012-2016). Two-person exhibitions include Sweet Lorraine Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2025) and group exhibitions include Terrain Biennial Newburgh, NY (2025, 2019); ABC No Rio, New York (2025); PS122 Gallery, New York (2024); Staten Island Museum, NY (2022); Center for Book Arts, New York (2017, 2015, 2011, 2006); MOCA Arlington, VA (2016); BRIC, Brooklyn, NY (2015, 2013); Proteus Gowanus, Brooklyn, NY (2013); Queens Museum, NY (2009); Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY(2006); and more. Residencies include Wave Hill, Bronx, NY (2024); Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York (2022, 2010); TYPA, Tartu, Estonia (2021); SPACES, Cleveland, OH (2020); Baxter St at Camera Club of New York (2017); TCenter for Book Arts, New York (2010); and MacDowell, Peterborough, NH (2008).