Ephemeral Beauty- 2027 Juried Art Exhibit

Contact InformationKahilu Exhibits - Kahilu Theatre FoundationContact Email: [email protected] Phone: 808-885-6868

Requirement OverviewLocation Eligibility Type: InternationalEligible Applicant Types: ArtistSubmission Limit: 1Media RequirementsImages | Min: 0, Max: 10Audio | Min: 0, Max: 6Video | Min: 0, Max: 6Total | Min: 1, Max: 20

Opportunity SummaryKahilu Exhibits seeks artwork for our 2026 Juried Art Exhibition, Ephemera Beauty. This exhibition will be on view January 14, 2026 through February 28, 2027 in Kahilu’s Simperman and Suli T. Go Galleries in Waimea, Hawaiʻi Island.Guest Juror, Andrzej Kramarz (Gallery Director - East Hawaiʻi Cultural Center, Hilo), invites artists to submit artworks that investigate the quiet paradox at the heart of our relationship with flowers.

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General InformationThere is a quiet paradox at the heart of our relationship with flowers. They are among the most fleeting things in nature—blooming, fading, and falling within days—and yet no other living form has been so permanently woven into human civilization. Ephemeral Beauty invites artists to sit within this paradox: to consider how something so temporary has come to carry the weight of our deepest emotions, our economies, our myths, and our understanding of what it means to be alive. What follows is meant to reveal how broad this subject can be, and to spark directions you might not yet have imagined.We are, it seems, made to notice flowers. Long before they became symbols, they were signals—markers of fertile land, of water, of the harvest to come. This ancient attentiveness lingers in us still. A single bloom placed in a sterile hospital room whispers to something older than language, telling us that life thrives here. Artists might begin with this instinct alone—tracing how a biological reflex blossomed into one of humanity's most universal forms of expression.Across every culture on Earth, people arrived at the same conclusion: that these brief, beautiful things are worth cherishing—and worth speaking through. In Greek myth, flowers sprang from the blood of the dying. In Buddhist thought, the lotus rose unstained from muddy waters as the emblem of the awakening soul. In the Hawaiian moʻolelo of ʻŌhiʻa and Lehua, two lovers separated by a jealous goddess are reunited only through transformation—one into a gnarled tree, the other into its red blossom—so that to pluck the flower is to part the lovers, and the sky weeps rain in response. These stories reveal a shared human impulse: to see our own longing, loss, and love reflected in the life of a flower.It feels especially meaningful to hold this conversation here, in Hawaiʻi, where nature is not a backdrop but a living, powerful presence. On these islands, fragility and force exist side by side: blossoms cling to the rims of volcanoes, and beauty grows directly out of raw creation. To reflect on the ephemeral among landscapes so vividly alive is not incidental to this exhibition—it is, perhaps, its truest home.For the flower is, above all, a mirror. It buds, blooms in glory, and fades—an unavoidable rehearsal of our own passage through the world. This is why the same blossoms attend both our weddings and our funerals, why the cherry blossom embodies mono no aware, the tender ache of impermanence, and why the Victorians built floriography, a secret language, so that a flower might say what the heart could not.And there is a more intimate register we should not overlook. A flower is, after all, a plant's sexual organ—all fragrance and color and unfurling petals designed to attract. Human eyes have never missed this. O'Keeffe's luminous blooms became icons of sensuality; the lotus and the rose have long symbolized erotic love. Here, too, the ephemeral matters—for eroticism, like the bloom, lives in the charged brevity of its perfection.It is worth remembering that beauty has never been innocent of power. The Dutch "Tulip Mania" of the 1630s produced humanity's first speculative bubble, and centuries of colonial "economic botany" turned plants into imperial commodities. That inheritance persists in today's floral trade—a global industry worth tens of billions, its supply lines running from equatorial fields to the auction floors of the Netherlands.Flowers have healed us, too. They filled the oldest pharmacies of Egypt, India, China and Hawaiʻi, and endure in modern medicine: digoxin from the foxglove, morphine from the poppy, artemisinin defeating malaria. They have adorned us across millennia—from Cleopatra's rose baths to the jasmine fields of Grasse—and remain the fragrant heart of perfume, where thousands of blossoms are pressed into a single gram of scent.————A note on what we are seeking:All approaches are welcome. We do not exclude representational work—a floral still life can be as powerful as the most abstract installation. What will most shape this exhibition, however, is originality of interpretation: work that engages with the flower's meaning—its memory and metaphor. Across any medium, we invite you to respond to the idea of the flower as much as its image.Ephemeral Beauty asks you to hold all of this at once: the fragile and the powerful, the sacred and the commercial, the healing and the mournful. In the end, we cherish flowers not despite their impermanence but because of it. Look closely, and quickly—the blooms are already changing, and we hope you will show us what they mean to you.—————Curator guidance for Artwork StatementsAn artwork statement should offer insight into the ideas behind the work rather than describe what viewers can already see. Begin by including the title and medium. Then explain the artwork’s central concept, context, references, or inspiration. You may discuss personal experiences, cultural or historical influences, social concerns, research, or questions that informed the work.Focus on the meaning and intentions behind the artwork: What led you to