The Burlington Contemporary Art Writing Prize seeks to discover talented writers on contemporary art. The winner of the Prize receives £1,000, their review is published on Burlington Contemporary and they have the opportunity to publish a review of a future contemporary art exhibition in The Burlington Magazine.

Since its foundation in 1903 The Burlington Magazine has considered the art of the present to be as worthy of study as the art of the past. The Burlington Contemporary Art Writing Prize advances our commitment to the study of contemporary art in the magazine and on Burlington Contemporary. Designed to encourage aspiring writers, the Prize promotes clear, concise and well-structured writing that is able to navigate sophisticated ideas without recourse to over-complex language.

Deadline 17th July 2023

£1,000 prize

This year’s judges are the art historian, writer and editor Huey Copeland and the artist Adam Pendleton.

Huey Copeland is BFC Presidential Associate Professor of Modern Art and Black Study at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Copeland is an editor of October and the author of numerous articles, essays and reviews, as well the monograph Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (2013). His most recent volume is Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World, an anthology co-edited with Steven Nelson, commissioned by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and published by Yale University Press.

Adam Pendleton is an artist based in New York. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at numerous museums, most recently the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021–22), the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2022) and the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (2023). His work has also been featured in the Venice Biennale (2015), the Whitney Biennial (2022) and other prominent group exhibitions, including Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America at the New Museum, New York (2021). Writing and publishing are central to Pendleton’s practice, and his many books include Black Dada Reader (2017), Heavy as Sculpture (2021) and Who Is Queen? A Reader (2021). In 2020 he founded DABA, an imprint for books on art, experimental writing and visual poetry. To date, DABA has published books by N. H. Pritchard, Brion Gysin and Giovanna Sandri, among others.

Submission Criteria

• Entrants must have published no more than six pieces of writing in print or online prior to their submission. This does not include personal blogs and websites.
• Contemporary is defined as art produced since 2000.
• There is no age limit for applicants.
• To enter the prize, entrants should submit one unpublished review of a contemporary art exhibition by the specified deadline: 17th July 2023.
• The exhibition under review should be current or have closed within the last six months at the date of submission. Texts about the applicant’s own work or project will not be accepted.
• The review must be between 800 and 1,000 words in length and accompanied by up to three low-resolution images.
• The submitted review must be written in English (although the art considered may be international) and emailed as a text document together with a completed submission (you will find on their website) form to: burlingtoncontemporary@burlington.org.uk. 
• Please include your full name in the submitted file names.

contemporary.burlington.org.uk