About the Award

In response to the final phase of the Decade of Centenaries the Arts Council is planning a national programme, Art 2023, a call to artists and arts organisations, to surprise and renew the state.  

In partnership with and support from the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, the call will take place in 2022, with a final programme announced and commencing in 2023; it is a unique opportunity for artists to reinvigorate the Irish imagination and to look at the Decade of Centenaries from new perspectives through the creation of ambitious projects for the public. 

This programme will build upon the Art 2016 programme previously presented by the Arts Council with support from Government.

An Open Call to the artists and arts organisations of Ireland to create national collaborative ground-breaking public-facing projects of ambition, impact and scale that encourage discourse, provocation or response to place and identity as part of contemporary Ireland. 

Open Call is a programme for artists and arts organisations to develop and shift their practice and profile work for the public on a national scale, creating high-profile arts central to people’s lives. 

In the context of this award, collaboration refers to working with other artists or organisations, or may refer to collaboration with communities of place or interest. Projects of ‘scale and ambition’ is understood to mean work that is impossible to achieve in your current practice, significant in vision, irrespective of physical, temporal or quantitative scale. 

Projects proposed in response to the Open Call may be in any artform(s), cross-disciplinary or interdisciplinary. 

Open Call 2023 is for projects commencing in 2023 and completing in 2023, or the first quarter of 2024 in alignment with the decade of centenaries.  

Note

You may only submit an application if you have applied to the Open Call Award 2023 Phase 1 and have been shortlisted and directed to apply to the Open Call Award 2023 Phase 2.  

Applicants are invited into Phase 2 based on their Phase 1 proposals. It is reasonable to expect that the initial proposal will develop as you progress your research or in light of conversations with prospective partners, for example; therefore, any developments in support of your original proposal should be submitted to Phase 2 of the Open Call Award. 

Deadlines 

The application window for Open Call 2023 (Phase2) will open on Tuesday 5th July 2022. The deadline for this Scheme is 5.30pm on Thursday, 29th September, 2022. Applications will be accepted through the Arts Council’s Online Services Website. 

Application process

There are two strands in Open Call 2023, a Lower Strand for awards €100,000-€250,000 to support new medium scale proposals of ambition and an Upper Strand for awards and €251,000- €500,000 to support larger programmes of scale. Each strand designed to support different size projects and programmes in response to the decade of centenaries.   

An individual or organisation may make only one application to Open Call 2023 and therefore can apply to only one of the two strands available.  

Note 

Applicants invited to apply to Phase 2 of the Open Call Award must remain in the original strand to which they applied in Phase 1. For example, if you applied to the lower strand of the Open Call Award Phase 1, you must apply to the lower strand in Phase 2. 

Please note that successful applicants will be expected to commence their projects proposals in 2023 and deliver/complete their projects no later than the first quarter of 2024 in alignment with the final year of the decade of centenaries.  

Full details of the application process will be provided in the scheme guidelines from 5th July 2022.