cOllAge
David Carson, Guest Juror
CALL FOR ART | JURIED BY DAVID CARSON
Award-Winning, Legendary Graphic Designer + Artist
Presented by Juniper Rag
DEADLINE: JUNE 8, 2026
COLLAGE ARTISTS WANTED
Forget clean lines. Forget permission. This is where instinct wins.
TORN seeks collage and montage work from visual artists, graphic designers, photographers—anyone cutting, tearing, layering, distorting, and pushing collage or montage. Looking for innovative work and risk taking as well as brilliant compositions and clever use of collage. Raw edges, original thinking. Strange juxtapositions. Beautiful accidents. This show celebrates rule breaking. The very act of collage making is a celebration of rule breaking.
Incredibly—we’ve got David Carson as guest juror. A true original. A rule-breaker who turned graphic design into a his own visual language the world couldn’t look away from. David has the kind of eye that won't just judge work—he'll feel it and contemplate it.
Super flex-- an epic opportunity to have your work elevated by a total legend.
Cut it up. Tear it. Layer it. Submit it.
A Virtual Collage Exhibition
Juniper Rag is calling in the X-Acto cutters, the paper tearers, the assemblers of beautiful wreckage.
TORN is an open call for all collage, physical or digital, mixed or mutant. We have handed the keys on this one to David Carson. Yeah, that David Carson. The guy who blew up the rulebook in the '90s and never looked back. If you know, you know. If you don't, look him up asap.
What we're looking for: Work that is honest to the cut. Analog, digital, or somewhere in the bleed between. Collage, photomontage, assemblage, mixed media, documentation — if tearing, cutting, layering, and recontextualizing are in its DNA, we want to see it. No size restrictions. No style restrictions. Restrictions are for someone else's show. We must honor originality and continuously challenge conventionality in art and design by not following trends, but to use our imaginations and reinvent them by challenging the viewers and most importantly, ourselves. Artists, do not feel that your work has to look like a grunge rock album cover. We want to see YOUR narrative, your way.
David Carson will jury the work. We trust the collection will be epic.
Submission details:
Submit up 3-5 works via our Submittable. You’ll need to make an account if you don’t already have one. All information and instructions will be there at the link below.
Deadline: June 8, 2026 at 11:59 pm.
Exhibition opens: Late June and will be shared all summer.
Open to: All international visual artists, everywhere. Virtual means borderless.
Juniper Rag is an independent art platform rooted in the belief that the margins are where the interesting stuff lives. We were founded to elevate international artists, creating new pathways to collectors, without the overhead of a gallery and the extreme logistical costs of typical exhibitions.
ARTIST: Robert Steffen, Detour
Artists that shatter contemporary narratives
by reassembling the bits of daily life in newspapers, tickets and advertisements,
posters, pages, boxes and signs into new subversive or creative social commentary—
Submit your work to TORN.
TORN doesn’t have to be a clean exhibition. Tidy may not be your thing. We want all collage, from the meticulous cuticle scissor cuts to including work that may carry the scar of its making. We want images and typography pulled from their context and forced into new conversations, layers that shouldn't belong together but somehow do, fragments that communicate more broken-up than they ever could whole.
Collage has always been the medium of the dissenters and ephemera lovers. We have used it to mock a world that has lost its mind. We use it to snarl at the machine. Your grandmother used it to make sense of a life lived in collected moments. Collage kind of refuses to be categorized, which is exactly why we love it.
Collage has always been where art goes when it needs to tell the truth. Born from the same restless energy that questioned what a picture even was, it became the weapon of choice for every generation that had something to say and refused to say it politely. Global propaganda reassembled as critique, the dreamers who raided the visual archive of everyday life to map the unconscious, the pop insurgents who held a mirror up to consumer culture using consumer culture's own image!
What made the first collage documented in 1912 seismic was not the use of adhesive but the conceptual disruption, much like David’s work accomplished. The picture plane became a surface where the real world and its newspapers, packaging and all the ephemera could land and mean something entirely different. Cubism had already fractured objects into simultaneous viewpoints and collage took that fragmentation and made it literal.
We hold creative rule breakers in high esteem.
They open the gates to creative thinking, experimenting and risk-taking.
David Carson
Our Guest Juror
Before David Carson ever touched a layout, he was reading waves. A ranked professional surfer who cracked the world's top ten, Carson came to graphic design the way most great things happen — sideways, through a side door, on his own terms. A sociology grad from San Diego State who stumbled into a two-week design workshop and never fully came back, he spent his formative years deep inside the surf and skate subcultures of Southern California with Surfer magazine, eventually channeling all of that kinetic, anti-establishment energy into the pages of Transworld Skateboarding, Beach Culture, and then, the one that changed everything — Ray Gun magazine.
At Ray Gun, Carson didn't just art direct. He detonated. His precedent setting layouts were collage in motion, fractured, layered, typographically feral, and so gloriously indifferent to readability. David Carson profoundly influenced graphic design forever beginning in the 90s. He famously set an entire interview in Zapf Dingbats, a font of symbols and ornaments because he found the conversation boring and thought the reader deserved to be told that visually. They printed it and Ray Gun's circulation tripled. The design world lost its mind. Newsweek said he changed the public face of graphic design. Creative Review called him the art director of the era. The American Center for Design declared his work the most important coming out of America.
What followed was a career so big it barely fits a page. He took his anti-grid gospel to Nike, Pepsi, Levi's, Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz, Ray-Ban, and Quiksilver. Proof to the world that creative rebellion, when it's authentic, is the most persuasive language there is. He collaborated with Nine Inch Nails on the visual identity of The Fragile, designed surfboards, shot photography across the globe, and published a body of books — The End of Print, 2nd Sight, Fotografiks, Trek that have lived on design school shelves and in studio corners ever since.
His most recent work, nu collage, strips away the clients and the briefs entirely, leaving just Carson doing what he's always essentially done: tearing the world apart and reassembling it into something that hits you somewhere beneath the rational mind. He spends winters on a surf break in the British Virgin Islands. He is still watching waves and wracking time on the water. He was awarded the AIGA Gold Medal in 2014, the field's highest honor and he remains, as busy and creative as ever, coming off collabs rebranding Macallan and projects with Porsche Quiksilver and a few he can’t mention yet. David is a sought after guest speaker and will be appearing at the upcoming Cannes Advertising Awards, as well as doing a series of new collages for a new ad agency launch in Madrid this summer.
A few years ago in a sandy beach bar in the BVI, a friend introduced us to David over a few Caribs. When the idea to do a collage exhibition emerged, one of David’s reels popped up. He is jurying TORN because collage is, and always has been, where he lives and we thought he’d be the greatest person we could have.
Images: David Carson
Graphic Design USA
magazine in New York
listed Carson among the top 5
most influential designers of the era,
alongside Milton Glaser,
Paul Rand, Saul Bass
and Massimo Vignelli.
The Smithsonian
Institution magazine
called Carson
"one of America's
most important artists."
Graphis magazine
in New York said in 2025,
“Carson is the reigning
Picasso of the international
graphic design
community”.
AWARDS for TORN
ART: Robert Steffen
1st Place:
Artist will receive a Solo Virtual Exhibition Package
Virtual exhibition of max 12 pieces of art published on our website, complimentary placement in our ART MARKET,
a promotion on our social media and a banner on our website homepage, a $3K value.
2nd Place:
Artist will receive a Feature Interview Package 1
Published on our blog, complimentary placement in our ART MARKET,
+ 2 complimentary social media posts $2K value
3rd Place:
Artist will receive a Feature Interview Package 2
Published on our blog, complimentary placement in our ART MARKET, and 1 social media push, a $1.25K value
AN ART ADVOCACY PLATFORM FROM
Juniper Rag is backed by a marketing agency, Atelier ID Global, also co-founded by us—Michelle May and Payal Thiffault. We are fine artists ourselves, so we understand the art landscape, the needs of artists and strategic business collaborations that widen your network. We are different than other online magazine and art promotion platforms. Just ask any of our artists.
Juniper Rag is building a bridge between visual artists and the interior design world by creating curated opportunities for artwork to live in both residential and corporate environments. Through juried calls, virtual exhibitions, and direct partnerships with designers and brands, Juniper Rag positions artists for real-world placement and long-term collaboration. Our goal is to make original art more accessible to design professionals while expanding meaningful, profitable pathways for artists.
Inclusion in a curated digital exhibition by Juniper Rag
Juniper Rag on Art Vérite, our blog
Promotion to interior designers, corporate buyers, and residential collectors
Consideration for future placement, acquisition invitations, and listing opportunities on our Art Market and Artist Directory.
Social media spotlight across Juniper Rag channels with cross posting through our collaborators
Possible press from collaborations
Opportunities for interviews, studio features, and collector introductions
A REC FROM ARTIST, SIMONE SCHOLES
“As a figurative oil painter who began working seriously in 2019, I was still finding my footing when I discovered Juniper Rag through a call for art in 2022. At the time, I was submitting to the occasional local show and navigating the art world with more questions than answers. Juniper Rag changed that.
Their platform opened doors I hadn’t imagined—from gaining collectors in Newton, Worcester, Boston, and Newport, to building lasting relationships with artists across the globe. What sets Juniper Rag apart is not just their reach, but their heart. The support and guidance I received—from how to approach submissions, to articulating my work, to navigating social media and applications—was generous, strategic, and deeply human.
Their curatorial vision is on fire. I’ve watched their exhibitions evolve with increasing depth and sophistication, culminating in the current show Delirium—a cinematic, emotionally charged triumph that’s their best yet.
Michelle and Payal, the visionary co-founders, have created more than a publication or a platform—they’ve built a community. One that is ambitious yet inclusive, high-level yet grounded in real connection. I now count them as friends, and I’m endlessly grateful for the role they’ve played in my growth as an artist.
If you’re an Artist looking for a place that sees your potential and helps you rise into it, Juniper Rag is that place.” —Simone Scholes, 2025
