For our fall issue, we are interested in hearing about your creative process: how does making affect your thinking? We hope you will share insights on how creation is a form of reflection that helps envision and shape new ideas.
We look forward to hearing about the ways in which physical choices such as medium, materials, technique, and scale help develop and refine ideas and how engaging with the artwork’s materiality may alter or expand the vision of what is being created and even lead to new avenues of thought.
Cindy Dow, Giraffe Music, ink wash.
Further questions include:
- Do you combine or alternate making and reflecting, action and meditative states?
- Does your thinking evolve through the act of making? If yes, how?
- Do you set out to resolve problems or do you let the creative flow take over? How do you combine or balance control and spontaneity?
- Does the creative process help you to gain more clarity, understand, or even reveal hidden truths? Does the process of artmaking lead to ways of considering, for the work itself or for life, unexpected approaches, results, and outcomes?
- Does this process-oriented approach to creating extend to approaching other issues in life and society? Does “thinking through making” help you imagine a future and envision new realities?
Leonardo da Vinci, Adoration of the Shepherds, charcoal, ink, watercolor, and oil paint on wood, 97 x 96 in. (246 x 243 cm), 1481, Uffizi, Florence (photo: Wikimedia Commons).
Deadline: 1 September 2025.
Guidelines for UMVA Members’ Showcase:
We invite MAJ member artists to participate in the Showcase (to become a member: click here).
- For the Thinking Through Making issue, submit up to four JPEG or png images (NO TIFF files), approximately 2500 pixels on longest side, resolution 72dpi.
- Label each image file as follows: your last name_Number of Image_Title (with no spaces in the title). Please DO NOT put whole caption/credit in image file label, see image list/caption format below (if you are submitting for a group put your own last name in first).
- Include a numbered image list at the end of your statement or brief essay (600 words or less) in Word doc. format, NOT a PDF.
- Image list/caption format: create a list that is numbered to match the number in your image file label that includes the following in this order: Artist’s Name, Title of Work, medium, size (example: 9 x 12 in.), date (optional), photo credit (example: photo: Ansel Adams) if not included we assume it is courtesy of the artist. Example: Unknown Artist, Untitled, oil on canvas, 9 x 12 in., 2000 (photo: Ansel Adams).
- Label your document file names: Last Name_Title.
- Please wait until all of your material is compiled to submit.
Put “Thinking Through Making” in the subject line and submit by email to umvalistings@gmail.com by the 1 September 2025 deadline. MAJ will limit the “Members’ Showcase” section to UMVA members who have not been published in the past year.
Do not send preformatted visual essays. Our editors will lay out text and images submitted using the guidelines above.
It is the MAJ’s policy to request and then publish image credits. We will not publish images the submitter does not have the right to publish. However, it is to be assumed that any uncredited or unlabeled images are the author’s/submitter’s own images. By submitting to the MAJ, you are acknowledging respect for these policies.
Image at top: Piet Mondrian, The Gray Tree, oil on canvas, 31.3 x 42.9 in. (79.7 x 109.1 cm), 1911, Kunstmuseum, The Hague (photo: Wikimedia Commons).