The 2026 Quiet Riot ART Prize

Small Works. large Impact.

The Rose Street Artists’ MArket Inaugural Art prize

Quiet Riot is built on a simple provocation: that power doesn’t require size.

Within 30 x 30cm, we ask artists to compress ideas, distil intent, and deliver work that lands with force. No excess. No noise for the sake of it. Just clarity, tension, and impact.

Set within the historic walls of Barwon Park Mansion, this prize invites a collision - between old and new, restraint and rebellion, silence and statement.

A Quiet Riot is not passive. It’s a contained energy. A deliberate act. A work that draws you in, then refuses to let go.

Small in scale. Uncompromising in presence.

More about the prize

THIS YEARS THEME

Heirloom

An heirloom is inheritance made physical - a small object asked to carry the weight of memory, lineage, and meaning across generations.

For the 2026 Quiet Riot Small Works Prize, Heirloom invites artists nationally to consider what gets passed down: the treasured and the burdensome, the chosen and the imposed.

Held within Barwon Park Mansion, a house full of Victorian silver, portraits, and pastoral wealth the theme asks not only what families hand on with care, but what society hands down without asking.

Perfectly scaled for small works, Heirloom welcomes the miniature, the fragment, and the conceptual: pieces about what we keep, what we cannot put down, and what we quietly refuse to inherit.

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