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Art Prizes calling in December 2025
Published 7 days ago • 3 min read
December 2025
There are no prizes without finalists
The effort and expense that artists incur to enter art prizes is quite extraordinary and is unfortunately often overlooked. We want to record those efforts on behalf of the art prize sector and are continuing to build a unique dataset of finalists for prizes. We can't do this for all prizes as the workload is too great, but we do try to cover as many as we can. I believe this is important data and I'm willing to wait for arts organisations to catch up and appreciate the insights the data brings. The data, in its aggregated form, reveals trends and identifies artists who are most active in the art prizes domain.
Thus far we have indexed 87 prizes in 2025:
YearCount of Finalists
2025 - 4865 finalists
2024 - 5564 finalists
2023 - 4765 finalists
2022 - 4687 finalists
Total number of finalist records in our dataset is 34,618
Ravenswood Australian Women's Art Prize golden tickets
To celebrate the 10th year of the prize we have been given two goldentickets to give away to our subscribers, worth $30 each. If you'd like to try for a giveaway, go to our instagram channel @artprizes.
The giveaway runs from 1-7 December 2025 and the two winners will be DMd on Monday 8 December.
ACAR Art Prize
This is a new landscape art prize that is open for entries until December 18 2025.
"By reimagining the landscape — in all its meanings — the ACAR Art Prize provides a platform for artists to share their vision." This is a NEW prize offering a rich opportunity for LANDSCAPE artists. Check out these prizes on offer: - ACAR Art Prize (acquisitive) — AUD $100,000 - Super Nova Award — AUD $5,000 (artists under 30) supported by BlackDiamondz - Digital Art Award — AUD $5,000 supported by BlackDiamondz - People’s Choice Award — AUD $5,000
Your feedback
It's kind of crazy that last month's newsletter and its subsequent correction resulting from the AI screw-up resulted in us receiving more emails from readers than anything to do with prizes. Artists - where's your attention span? But, as I explained to the furious email writers, I've written a novel about the perilous path AI takes us down - Dead White Men Tell Lies (on Amazon). There are different types of AIs and the one that helps with coding and analysis is not a threat. Without my AI tools, none of this would be available for free — using an AI saves me an amazing amount of work. In fact, it has enabled me to create the following in the past 90 days:
the IOS app ArtBiogs: Surfaced, which I personally use everytime I go to a gallery to learn more about the artists I'm interested in. It's currently in Beta, so any feedback would be appreciated. At the time of writing, only seven people are testing it, but I'd love to see more.
the new Prizes Calling email digest (listing prizes calling over the coming 90 days) — no editorial. I use this all the time to check what's happening with Calls. Around 150 artists have subscribed to this email — far fewer than I expected given how often artists ask me for information about prizes that will be calling "next month"! Subscribe to check it out.
the new https://members.art-prizes.com/website. This site features additional information for members and an integrated view of prizes and finalists. It built by actual human coders, but their work was based on original code I created using an AI.
Most successful finalists in 2025
Here they are — those artists who were selected in more art prizes that we tracked during 2025 than their peers.
You can find the full list of top 15 finalist for 2025 (or earlier years) by clicking here:
Here's an example of the listing (live feed), summarising the number of prizes that have an open call during each of the three months, the call status, prize title, type, the deadline for the call, and a link to the Art Prizes website to find more information:
Our new app — Artbiogs Surfaced
I'm using this app every time I go to a gallery — just to learn a little more about the artists on display.
Want to be one of the first to try it? Here's how to get access:
Download TestFlight from the Apple App Store (if you don't have it already)
We'd love your feedback as we continue building and improving the app.
Stay up to date with the Apple app
To stay in touch with calls, or just look up details about an art prize, the Art Prizes iOS app is available from the Apple store for $14.99 - a one-time fee. It shows prizes calling, metrics on prize winners and finalists, and a notification panel showing which prizes have just started calling or are closing soon.
November 2025 If you're viewing this on your phone go to landscape mode for best results due to the larger tables. Shared finalists across prizes in 2025 You may have read about a new prize called the Banksia Prize which, according to the Founders' Letter, is in response to bias in the judging of the bigger Australian art prizes. The Banksia Prize offers all artists an equal chance to be recognised. In most of our nation's top art prizes, judges are aware of who created each work, allowing...
October 2025 What a brilliant GIVEAWAY for one of our lucky followers - ONE free entry to the John Villiers Outback Art Prize. Can you support these important regional Australian art prizes and the communities that rely on them? It's a prize held in Winton, Central Queensland, a beautiful part of regional Australia - where daily life is the complete opposite of city life. I went there in 2023 and found it to be amazing. Alongside the community's strong support for the visual arts, Winton also...
September 2025 It's the quiet time for art prize calls right now as you can see by the smaller number of sponsored calls listing. The number of prizes calling at this time of the year is a third of that in the first half of the year. And this year, it was particularly busy for me even though I was travelling overseas for that period. The life of a digital nomad feels more attractive now i see how easy it can be. Anyway, with this quiet spell, I've taken this opportunity to work on new...
