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Each year, the festival has an open call for T-shirt designs responding to the visual theme that inspires all of our festival art and visual identity.Â
T-shirt designs can be inspired by the theme or one of the prompts included in the outline. We are very open-minded about what the theme may spark creatively and are looking for concepts which explore the theme’s ideas visually.Â
It is free to submit your design concept and if selected, you receive either two Classic passes or a small cash stipend. Our merch team will work with you after selection to ensure the final design is the best representation of your concept. We ask that applications include at least one reference/design image, either a jpg or pdf, and selected designs will need to be delivered as illustrator files.Â
Submissions open in the fall and successful applicants are informed by early January each year.Â
Design Theme & Prompts
True/False 2027 Theme: Deep Roots/Wild Bloom
Growth is rarely tidy or predictable. Every fruit or flower, fungi, and fern is held up by a secret world we cannot see, anchored by gnarled roots underground. What happens beneath the surface can be just as beautiful, and much stranger, than what we see above. While plants grow vertically chasing the sunlight, root systems reach out towards one another, building community. It is these systems of connection that make all life on — and in — Earth not only possible but also extraordinary.
The Deep Roots/Wild Bloom theme honors that to know where you’re going, you need to show where you’ve been; to achieve our wildest dreams, we draw strength from the soil that has nourished us. True/False has grown strong, and survived years of historic and global adversity, by reaching into our past, out to our community, and up towards the sky.
By staying true to our identity and our moral compass, we find the structure and support needed to let the spirit of experimentation and collaboration burst wide open, year after year.
The 2027 festival will explore the ways we grow: individually, collectively, across generations and spiritual ancestors. This theme invites you to look deeper; to journey underground, sift through the soil, compost those fragments of memory, history, and emotion, and return to the world transformed.
We are planting some seeds here to help root you, but remember, we love to be surprised by all the wild and wonderful ways our audiences and collaborators interpret the theme and make it their own:
- Spring renewal
- Radicle is radical
- Root systems and rhizomatic figures
- Botanical and anatomical illustrations
- Evolution and metamorphosis
- Biodiversity is a necessity for survival
- Hybridity as creative provocation
- The obsessive geometry of nature: fractals and spirals
- The human plant: branching veins and respiratory trees
- Bizarre flora: venus flytraps, corpse flowers, ghost pipes
- Miraculous fauna: immortal jellyfish, electric eels
- The subterranean: caves, caverns, and tunnels
- Maximalism, excess, over-ripeness
- Mixed prints and power clashing
- High-contrast color palettes
- Artifacts of worlds past, buried underground
- Archaeology, excavation, treasure hunting
- Breaking through
- The crack is how the light gets in
- Collage as biomimicry
- Collision and confluence: natural and industrial, digital against analogue
Application
Submissions for True/False 2027 will open fall 2026. Selected artists will be notified by early January!
Questions? email:Â [email protected]