The theme for Modern Fuel’s 2023 Annual Juried Exhibition ‘Tenderness’ responds to various dialogues including radical softness, pain, vulnerability, and care.

The theme for Modern Fuel’s 2023 Annual Juried Exhibition ‘Tenderness’ responds to various dialogues including radical softness, pain, vulnerability, and care. Modern Fuel selected this topic due to its wide scope of interpretation and due to our collective desire to reignite and refuel intimate creative processes both inside and outside of our own organization. As the world recovers from isolation, a cause of trauma and further systemic oppression for many in and of itself, it is vital to establish communities that materialize and integrate radical care practices into the everyday. Tenderness in this sense means intimacy and empathy; it means recognizing and acting on the fact that our lives are necessarily interdependent; it means emphasizing and learning from the often-invisibilized radical care acts performed by oppressed folks; and it means so much more than this.