FD/MAS Global Awareness Art Competition

FD/MAS Global Awareness Art Contest 2023 is part of FD/MAS Alliance’s celebration of FD/MAS Global Awareness Week 2023. The theme this year is #myFDMASlife. The contest will be open for submissions on January 15th, 2023 for literary and visual art entries. 

Participants are required to be part of the FD/MAS community, which is to say that you or someone you know is diagnosed with fibrous dysplasia, McCune-Albright syndrome (FD/MAS).

All submissions are required to complete an artist profile, including contact information, age, FD/MAS community affiliation, and the title of the artwork.

All participants must sign a release form. 

The spirit of the contest is about sharing stories through art. Poor sportsmanship, cheating, copyright violations, or submitting artwork that does not belong to the artist is subject to immediate disqualification.

By submitting an entry (“Artwork”) to the FD/MAS Global Awareness Art Contest (“Contest”), hosted by the FD/MAS Alliance (the Alliance), you, as a Contest participant (“Artist”), accept for yourself or, if applicable, as the parent/guardian of an Artist, the following terms:

• I grant FD/MAS Alliance the non-exclusive rights to use my Artwork in digital or hard copy format for advertising, promotional, exhibiting, and or/any other purposes FD/MAS Alliance deems appropriate.
• I understand that submitting to the Contest will not affect my own rights to, and ownership of, my Artwork.
• I certify that my Artwork is my own.  No other individual or parties own or have obtained copyright to my Artwork. The permissions being granted do not violate any prior agreements I have made with anyone else.
• If, after the contest, my art is sold, I will disclose to the buyer that FD/MAS Alliance has been granted use of my art on the FD/MAS Alliance website, in print materials, and in web communications.
• I agree that my Artwork, in FD/MAS Alliance’s sole discretion, may be posted online at the Contest website and/or any other website as determined by FD/MAS Alliance, for visitors to the website(s) to view.
• I acknowledge that I have read and signed the Contest Artwork Release Form

Entries must include a 200-word or less artist statement, interpreting and describing the art from the artist’s point of view. The artist statement can include anything, but judges are particularly looking for artist statements that connect art to our theme: My FD/MAS life

We are open to visual art and written word submissions. Visual artists may use any medium but must submit a photo or image file of their artwork. Visual files must be uploaded at a resolution of 2MB or higher and should be uploaded as a JPEG, PNG, or GIF. High-resolution files are required in order to allow the artwork to be beautifully translated when printed for display.

Literary submissions may be delivered as a word document or PDF and should be limited to 1,000 words. At this time we are only able to accept English language submissions.

All participants must read and sign a release form.

Please note the Contest Schedule is Subject to Change

• January 15th, 2023 – The contest opens for submissions.
• February 15th @ 5pm ET – Contest closed for submissions, expert judges begin their review
• February 20th, 2023 – Public voting begins
• February 27th, 2023 – Public voting ends
• February 28th, 2023 – Winners announced

Finalists will be chosen by a combination of expert judges and community voting. Expert judges will be announced in the coming weeks. 

Art will be judged in two separate categories: visual and literary arts. Submissions may be further broken down into age categories.

Criteria will be based on the completion of the artist’s profile and interpretation of the artist’s statement. Winners will be notified at the end of February, and public voting will take place the week of FD/MAS Global Awareness Week (Feb 20-27th).

Literary Arts Judge:

Stephan Delbos, the first Poet Laureate of Plymouth, Massachusetts, is the author of the poetry chapbook In Memory of Fire (Cape Cod Poetry Review, 2016); and the poetry collections Light Reading (BlazeVOX, 2019); Small Talk (Dos Madres, 2021); and Two Poems (The Literary Salon, 2021). Two of his plays have been staged: Chetty’s Lullaby, about trumpeter Chet Baker, in San Francisco in 2014, and Deaf Empire, about composer Bedřich Smetana, by Prague Shakespeare Company in 2017. His translations from Czech include Vítězslav Nezval’s The Absolute Gravedigger (Twisted Spoon, 2016: recipient of the PEN / Heim Translation Grant) and Woman in the Plural (Twisted Spoon, 2021); and Paris Notebook by poet Tereza Riedlbauchová (Verse Chorus Press, 2020). His scholarly study, The New American Poetry and Cold War Nationalism, was published by Palgrave in 2021. He is a founding editor of B O D Y.

Visual Arts Judge:

Stephen Lamia is Professor Emeritus of Visual Arts, Dowling College. He has extensive museum, gallery, curatorial and pedagogical experience from several institutions in both The United States and Canada. He was Curator of Collections and Special Exhibitions at The McMaster University Art Gallery in Hamilton, Ontario, then Gallery Director at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY. He worked as Staff Lecturer in the Education Department of The Cloisters, the uptown Manhattan branch of the Medieval Department of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has also served as Guest Curator at The Anthony Giordano Gallery and The Islip Art Museum. His interests range from the Art of Ancient Egypt to cutting-edge Contemporary Art. Some of his curatorial projects include Thanatopsis: Images of Death in the Graphic Arts of Northern Europe, Egypt: The Source and the Legacy, Hot and Cool: The Iconography of Abstraction. Sharp Objects: Contemporary Assemblage Art. He also has extensive experience as a Fine Arts juror, serving as a committee member at The Bruce Museum in Greenwich , CT, The Anthony Giordano Gallery in Oakdale, NY and The Islip Art Museum in Islip, NY.

Please submit your artwork via our online portal.

The winning design in both literary and visual art categories will be used to create a postcard to be mailed to our community in the summer 2023. Winners will also be given a complimentary ticket to the FD/MAS Community Conference. This ticket is not transferrable and must be used by the contest winner.

Display Artwork at FD/MAS Community Conference

Finalists will have their artwork displayed and celebrated at the FD/MAS Community Conference in September 2023.

Artwork Displayed Year-Round

Awardees will have their art featured year-round on the FD/MAS Alliance website, social media, and print materials.

• Am I eligible to enter the contest? The FD/MAS Global Awareness Art Competition is open to all who are connected to the FD/MAS community space; patients, caregivers, family members and doctors, etc. 
• Is the contest open to international artists? Yes! This is in honor of FD/MAS GLOBAL Awareness week, after all. However, at this time we can only accept artist’s statements and written word submissions in English because of the limitations of our judging panel. 
• I am unable to upload my photo, it says the picture file is too big or too small. We do require the artist to submit a minimum of 2 MB or higher. This allows the image to be beautifully translated when displayed. If you need assistance with changing your file size, here are some tips:
  • Avoid downloading your artwork from Facebook or Facebook Messenger. This tends to shrink the image. 
  • Avoid uploading your artwork into the Cloud; your art may shrink in size to save space.
  • If you have a smartphone and can take a photo of your artwork, they tend to take photos between 3MB and 9MB.  
  • There are a few online programs and platforms that may be able to help resize your image. Canva, Adobe Photoshop, or GIMP (a free alternative to Photoshop) are both good options. Instructions for resizing a photo in GIMP can be found here. Instructions for resizing a photo in Canva can be found here.
  • If you have tried all the steps above and are still having difficulties, please email your file to info@fibrousdysplasia.org and we can try to resize your image.
• Can I submit a sculpture, dance performance, musical arrangement etc.? We are grateful for your interest in the FD/MAS Global Awareness Week Art competition and recognize that art includes a wide range of mediums, including yours. At this time, however, the contest is a visual and written word competition and artists are able to submit anything that can be photographed, including paintings, drawings, sketches, photography, and graphic design OR written pieces of no more than 1,000 words.

Have an additional question? Email info@fibrousdysplasia.org.