Call for Issue 15: Summer 2025
Curated by Todd Bartel and Paloma Trecka

Deadline for submissions: April 1, 2025

Obstructions and Disruptions

Obstructions and disruptions are generally considered unwanted, but they can just as easily point toward and instigate creative possibility. The accidental spilling of coffee over a collage in progress can be viewed as ruin or enhancement. For this call, curators Todd Bartel and Paloma Trecka invite artists to create collages that embrace the unexpected through visual, rhythmic, emotional, or conceptual disruptions.

– Todd Bartel & Paloma Trecka

To submit artwork responses:

  • Incorporate the unexpected.

  • Intervene order with disorder.

  • Disrupt and counterbalance.

  • Break harmony with dissonance.

  • Expose underlying patterns and superimposing structures.

  • Remove pieces from the whole.

  • Consider the unfinished as complete.

  • All eligible submissions must incorporate some portion or portions of Cut Me Up: Issue 14.

Re-Bop! Exhibition at the Beverly Arts Center

Selected works from Cut Me Up Issue 15 will be featured in the exhibition Re-Bop! at the Beverly Arts Center in Chicago, IL, during the summer of 2025. Re-Bop! is the third iteration of Bop!, the celebrated collage exhibition series that showcases the parallel ideas of flow in both music and collage—where intuition, playful abandon, and spur-of-the-moment change and happenstance are embraced with artistic fervor and verve. Re-Bop! looks at the notion of unexpected, disrupted, and obstructed collage-making. For more about Re-Bop!, please visit: bopartshow

  • Unframed work is welcome. Framed work should be framed with plexiglass.

  • Selected artists are responsible for shipping or delivering their work; a prepaid return label is required for all shipped works.

  • All works are fully insured while on the premises; any inquiries regarding sales or commissions will be referred directly to the artists.

  • The curators reserve the right to decline works received for the exhibition that differ significantly from the photographs representing the work accepted to the Cut Me Up publication.

Issue 15 Curators Todd Bartel and Paloma Trecka

Todd Bartel is a visual artist, teacher, writer, and independent curator. He teaches drawing, painting, collage, and conceptual art at the Cambridge School of Weston (MA). He is the founder of the school’s Thompson Gallery, where he mounted 50 exhibitions between 2007-2020.

Instagram: @collagehead | Web: toddbartel.com

Paloma Trecka is an artist and educator based in Chicago. She studied studio art and design for the Theater in Montreal at Concordia University (BFA). She currently teaches about the history of animation at Columbia College Chicago and DePaul University.

Instagram: @paloma_shaloma_xicago | palomashaloma.com


Cut Me Up Issue 15 was published on July 1, 2025.