Since its inception in 1969, FIRST STREET GALLERY has held juried exhibitions for nonmember artists. These shows provide emerging and mid-career artists, as well as artists with established backgrounds outside of major art centers, with exposure to the New York City art community, its curators and collectors, other artists, critics, and the gallery-going public. The artists’ work is shown in the gallery, shared on social media, and publicized in communications to the gallery’s extensive contacts nationwide.
SELECTS 2026
First Street Gallery is pleased to announce its “SELECTS 2026” juried exhibition call for artists. This is an opportunity for artists to exhibit a small body of work that explores a current or long-standing artistic interest. The show opens on January 8, 2026 and runs through January 30, in our Chelsea Gallery located at 547 West 27th Street, Suite 514 in New York City. “SELECTS 2026” will highlight a select group of artists, who will each have an exhibition area of approximately 10’H x 10’W of wall space (not necessarily contiguous). Artists with free-standing 3D work will be given the equivalent amount of floor space.
Entry Closed.
National Juried Exhibition
Initiated decades ago, the annual National Juried Exhibition is open to nonmember U.S. resident artists, working in a diverse range of two- and three-dimensional media. Recent past jurors include nationally prominent art writers (John Yau, Jed Perl, Lance Esplund); artists (April Gornik, Susanna Coffey, Clintel Steed, Paul Resika, Ronnie Landfield); art historians (Dore Ashton, Donald Kuspit); curators and gallerists specializing in contemporary works (Steven Harvey, Lori Bookstein, Peter Colon of DC Moore, Nancy Margolis, Andrew Arnot, Thomas Erben).
Our juror for the 2026 National Juried Exhibition is artist Scott Noel. Scott Noel is a Philadelphia-based painter who has taught painting and drawing in the region since 1982, culminating with a 28-year journey with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Over the same period, he has mounted over forty solo shows and has participated in numerous group exhibitions at commercial and university galleries. As a curator Noel has organized ten exhibitions exploring themes in perceptual painting and written catalogue essays on behalf of Lennart Anderson, Larry Day, Ben Kamihira, Sangram Majumdar, Peter Van Dyck, William Barnes, Michael Ananian and Philip Geiger. His most recent curatorial effort, “Contre-Jour and the Corinthian Maid,” advances a personal account of painting’s interpretation of light. Noel has received fellowships from the Cité International des Arts, the Independence Foundation, and the Bader Fund.
