Mad World: SoMad's Annual Earth Day Exhibition (Due Mar. 1)
Mad World: SoMad's Annual Earth Day Exhibition
Deadline: March 1st, 2026
SoMad invites your submissions for the fourth annual Mad World, an event and exhibition of experimental film, visual art, and performance exploring ecological crises through an intersectional environmentalist lens, opening on April 18, 2026.
This year’s theme understands environmental collapse not as a distant abstract condition, but as something shaped by systems of power: colonialism, borders, racial capitalism, and extractive industry. We are interested to see your work that considers how land, bodies, and movement are governed, and how other ways of knowing and caring could reconfigure our re lationship to the earth and to one another.
Our theme has been informed by intersectional environmentalism, a framework established by Leah Thomas, and rooted in the intellectual and political work of Black feminist scholars and organizers, including the Combahee River Collective and Kimberle Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality. This lineage understands social justice and environmental justice as inseparable struggles, and insists that ecological harm must be read through overlapping systems of race, gender, class and colonial power. We are drawn to practices that foreground Indigenous, diasporic, queer, and culturally inherited knowledge systems, not as symbolic references, but as living tools for survival, relation, and networks of care.
We are seeking work that engages with ecologies shaped by borders, migration, and displacement, and that approaches environmental crises as something lived and embodied. We are especially interested in practices that center Indigenous and cultural knowledge as ecological ways of knowing, and that expand ideas of care, labor, and maintenance as environmental practices.
We invite artists to trace the connections between flooding, toxicity, and climate collapse and the social conditions of our fellow humans, and to help us reframe our relationship with the earth by refusing extractive or colonial ways of seeing nature. We are drawn to work that imagines kinship across human and non-human worlds, and that dreams new ecological realities into being through community and collective care.
Apply for one or more of the submission categories: experimental video, visual art, and performance. If you would like to be considered for multiple categories, please submit an additional application.