2008–2009 Playbill Cover-Art Contest

10 Winners Each Receive $500 and Two Concert Tickets

Deadline: July 17, 2008

For the third season, Carnegie Hall is holding a contest to select art for its 10 Playbill program covers. Carnegie Hall’s 2008–2009 season is filled with a wide array of music, including two festivals—Bernstein: The Best of All Possible Worlds and Honor! A Celebration of the African American Cultural Legacy, curated by Jessye Norman.

The contest enters its second year this month, and submissions are being accepted for the 2007–2008 season. The only contest requirement is that submissions come from currently enrolled students—of art or of any other field. Among those whose work was selected for 2006–2007 are students of design, composition, architecture, and even the art of dentistry.

THEME
The intersection of art, music, and words

Below are quotations that can inspire your artwork. Please indicate which words connect with your artwork or include a poem or quotation of your own choice.

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley

Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die,
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
—Langston Hughes

It should be one’s sole endeavor
to see everything afresh and
create it anew.
—Gustav Mahler

Music: breathing of statues.
Perhaps:
silence of paintings. You language
where all language
ends. You time
standing vertically on the motion of
mortal hearts.
—Rainer Maria Rilke

[Art] signifies the more because
it does spring so wholly out of its
place, and the sap has run up into it
as into a tree.
—Eudora Welty

This will be our reply to violence:
to make music more intensely,
more beautifully, more devotedly
than ever before.
—Leonard Bernstein

Color is the key. The eye
is the hammer. The soul is
the piano with its many chords.
The artist is the hand that,
by touching this or that key,
sets the soul vibrating
automatically.
—Wassily Kandinsky

STYLE AND MEDIUM
Any style and any medium, including painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, and computer-generated art

ELIGIBILITY
Open to all enrolled students (valid identification required)

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS
JPEG, TIFF, or PDF digital format only; file size not to exceed 2 MB; e-mail file to artcontest@carnegiehall.org

Selected artists must be living, reside in the United States, provide their Social Security numbers, and sign a release for the use of their work. Winning works will appear on the covers of Carnegie Hall’s concert program books throughout the 2008–2009 season. Please note that while we encourage all forms of artistic expression, some controversial subject matter may not be suitable for publication. Also note that submissions should not be literal representations of musicians appearing at Carnegie Hall. Please note that while artists will retain ownership of their original works, Carnegie Hall will exercise the right to use the photographic representation of each winning work for archival and promotional purposes without limitation, including the right to adapt the photographic representation and use it in any medium now known or devised in the future, perpetually and throughout the world. Excerpt from Rilke’s “To Music” translated by Stephen Mitchell.