About Call and Response
Where it Started
In March 2020, COVID shut everything down. Studio spaces closed, shows got cancelled, and suddenly all the informal ways artists connected—studio visits, openings, critique groups—were gone.
I'd been running Shoebox Arts from the Brewery Arts Complex, connecting artists to opportunities and building community. When the pandemic hit, I watched artists lose not just income but creative connection. The ones who were already working outside the gallery system—no institutional affiliation, no teaching position—suddenly had nothing.
I kept thinking about collaboration. How the art world treats it as something that requires permission, curation, institutional blessing. How artists needed each other but all the structures for connection had disappeared.
On April 11, 2020, I sent an email to my network asking if anyone wanted to try something: get randomly paired with another artist and make work together for two weeks. No fees, no applications, just see what happens.
How it Works
The concept was simple: random pairings, rapid exchange, no barriers.
Artists would be matched with someone they'd never met—across cities, across mediums, across experience levels. They'd exchange work every 24 hours for two weeks. Digital files, photos of work, whatever they created. The 24-hour timeline was intentional—fast enough that you couldn't overthink it, slow enough to actually make something.
I was drawing from jazz call-and-response traditions, where musicians build off each other in real time. And surrealist exquisite corpse games, where chance creates unexpected beauty. But mostly I just wanted artists to have someone to make work with during lockdown.
The random pairing was the key. Not matching people by medium or aesthetic or career stage. True collaboration across difference, not similarity.
What Happened
We put out our first call for artists and over 100 people signed up.
Then we did another round. Then another.
Artists started telling other artists. Someone would participate in one round and bring three friends to the next. The Instagram posts spread. People from other cities started asking to join.
Twenty rounds later: 500+ artists across six continents. Los Angeles to New York, Canada to India, Germany to rural Iowa. Artists who've never met in person but talk weekly. Collaborations that turned into gallery shows—Jody Zellen and Lorraine Bubar kept working together and exhibited at Proxy Gallery. Partnerships that outlasted the original two weeks by years.
The themes evolved based on what artists asked for. Opulent Mobility focused on disability culture. A Multicultural View centered cultural exchange. We did rounds on gender, climate, aging, all the urgent questions artists were processing.
What I didn't expect: how political the work became just by existing.
Every round proved that quality collaboration doesn't require institutional permission. That artists can organize themselves. That meaningful exchange doesn't need gatekeepers or commercial pressure or someone deciding who deserves access.
Going Physical
For five years, Call and Response lived entirely online. Artists exchanged images, PDFs, videos. But people kept asking: what if we could mail actual objects? What if collaboration existed in three dimensions?
February 2026: our first physical iteration. Book art collaboration at the Start Up Art Fair in Venice Beach.
Same principles—random pairing, free access, no gatekeepers. Different format: four months instead of two weeks. Artists can mail books back and forth or create pieces separately and combine them. 190 artists signed up to make collaborative books.
It's the same experiment scaled differently. Eliminate barriers, trust the process, see what happens.
Where It Is Now
Twenty rounds. 500+ artists. Six continents. Documentation of what happens when you remove barriers and trust artists to connect with each other.
The work continues: monthly rounds, themed collaborations, ongoing partnerships that started years ago and keep going. Artists who met through random pairing and now consider each other essential to their practice.
The February 2026 book collaboration and exhibition represents the next test—can this model work physically, not just digitally? Can 190 artists across the world create collaborative books together?
Beyond that, there are possibilities. Training others to facilitate rounds. Curriculum for educators. Frameworks that could work in therapeutic settings, community centers, anywhere people need connection through making. The potential for Call and Response to become infrastructure that doesn't depend on me running every round.
But right now, it's what it's always been: a simple system for artists who need each other.
Why It Matters
Call and Response exists because the art world operates through gatekeepers. Application fees. Portfolio requirements. Institutional blessing. All the ways we're told we need permission to be a professional artist.
This program says: you don't need permission. You don't need the right credentials or connections. You just need willingness to make work with someone you've never met.
It's for the rural artist who thinks meaningful collaboration only happens in cities. The emerging artist without an MFA or gallery. The established artist sick of hierarchy who wants to work with someone outside their usual circle. Anyone who remembers why they became an artist in the first place—not for career milestones but for the actual making.
The art world talks about diversity and inclusion. Call and Response shows what that looks like in practice: free access, random pairing, trust in artists to organize themselves.
Where It's Going
The long-term goal: Call and Response becomes something bigger than what I can personally manage.
Training others to facilitate rounds. Curriculum that institutions can adapt. Networks of organizers supporting each other. Documentation thorough enough that anyone committed to the principles—radical accessibility, random pairing, minimal barriers—can run their own version.
We're exploring how this translates beyond traditional art contexts. Therapeutic settings. Educational institutions. Community organizations. Anywhere the basic structure—random pairing, creative exchange—might create connection.
The February 2026 exhibition is our test of physical collaboration at scale. If 190 artists successfully create books together across geography and culture, we'll know this can work in different formats. We'll have proof that Call and Response isn't just pandemic relief but sustainable infrastructure.
Maybe it grows into specialized rounds, fellowship programs, institutional partnerships. Maybe it stays exactly what it is: a simple system for connecting artists who need each other. No fees. No applications. No gatekeepers.
Either way, Call and Response continues as long as artists need alternatives to the traditional art world's exclusionary systems.
Keep an eye out for our open calls for new artists.
Follow the project:
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Instagram: @callandresponseart
Want to bring Call and Response to your organization? We're developing curriculum and training for institutions interested in facilitating their own collaborative programs. Email callandresponseart@gmail.com for partnership opportunities.
About Our Founder
Kristine Schomaker
I founded Call and Response in 2020 as an experiment in what happens when artists engage with each other's work across distance, discipline, and perspective. What started as a simple question—what if artists responded to each other in sequence, building something together that none of us could make alone?—has grown into 22 rounds of collaboration connecting over 500 artists across six continents.
I'm an artist, curator, and the founder of Shoebox Arts, a comprehensive artist support network based at the Brewery Arts Complex in Los Angeles. For over a decade, I've worked as what I call "The Great Connector"—building systems that help artists sustain their practices, find opportunities, and collaborate meaningfully. That philosophy drives everything I do, from Shoebox's weekly community conversations and mentorship programs to Art and Cake Magazine (which I also publish), to Call and Response itself.
My own artistic practice explores themes of perception, identity, and transformation through multimedia work, collage, and narrative reconstruction. My project Perceive Me examines body image and self-perception through collaborative portraiture with nude models. This focus on how we see ourselves and each other—and how collaboration can shift that perception—runs through all my work.
Call and Response emerged from my belief that artists don't need to compete for scarce resources. We're stronger when we build together. Each round invites artists to respond to a specific theme or prompt, creating chains of visual conversation where every piece is both a response to what came before and a prompt for what comes next. Some collaborations happen between artists who've never met. Some span oceans. Some bridge generations or completely different media—painters responding to sculptors, photographers to poets.
My approach has been shaped by artists and organizers who demonstrate what becomes possible when we build collective infrastructure. Caroline Woolard's work on cooperation, barter networks, and collaborative economic structures showed me how to create systems that serve artists rather than extracting from them. Theaster Gates proved that art practice and community building aren't separate—his transformation of abandoned spaces into cultural centers on Chicago's South Side demonstrates how artists can rebuild entire ecosystems. Sharon Louden's tireless advocacy for artist sustainability and her work amplifying diverse artistic voices reinforced my commitment to practical support over theoretical solutions.
Like these artists, I believe in creating infrastructure that strengthens our entire community. Call and Response is part of that infrastructure—a space where making art together strengthens all of us, where the act of responding to each other's work builds the kind of relationships that sustain creative practice over the long term.
Every two weeks, a new round of responses unfolds. Every collaboration teaches me something about what becomes possible when we stop working in isolation and start working in conversation.