KEY DATES
- Open Date: June 16, 2026
- Submission Deadline: July 7, 2026 at 10 am PT
- Critique Period: July 7, 2026 - July 8, 2026 at 10 am PT
- Expected Voting Period: July 8, 2026 - July 22, 2026
All phases end at 10 a.m. PT
OVERVIEW
It’s time for our eleventh annual Kids and Teen Art Challenge, in partnership with Pottery Barn Kids and Pottery Barn Teen. Pottery Barn Kids and Teen are two established retailers in Children’s and Teen decor. In the last eleven years of this partnership, winning designs have been exposed to millions of customers online, in stores, in print, and on social media.
Minted, Pottery Barn Kids, and Pottery Barn Teen will all source new Children’s Art and Teen Art collections from this challenge. We will take ~50 picks in total; Pottery Barn Kids and Pottery Barn Teen will select at least 15 Editors’ Picks each to be sold on their websites. All PB picks will also be sold on Minted.com. Some winning pieces may be featured in the Pottery Barn Kids or Pottery Barn Teen catalog.
Important Notes
Submission limit: 10 total submissions. K-level artists in our CMYK Program are exempt from this submission limit.
We are looking to build an assortment featuring both custom and non-custom art pieces across all media (paintings, drawings, graphic, photography, and mixed media), with artwork suitable for children, tweens, and teens of all genders. We are not sourcing Nursery art in this challenge.
Winning pieces will only be required to scale to 30”x40” or 30”x30”. Winning pieces from this challenge are no longer required to scale to our largest sizes (48”x70” and 44”x44”). Please note our file requirements outlined in the “How to Submit Winning Files” section in the brief.
Artists with winning pieces whose original files scale to 30”x40” or 30”x30” will have the option to add multiple colorways for their designs. While up to six colorways are supported on our product pages, we recommend you add no more than four colorways per design. Your submissions should only be in one colorway. If applicable, we will notify you that your piece is eligible for multiple colorways during the Final File Request period. Please note: if your winning piece is part of a pair, set, or gallery wall, all designs from that grouping must scale in order for any to be eligible for multiple colorways.
Pottery Barn Kids will select pieces for children ages ~3-8. We want to emphasize that these picks should not feel overtly Nursery, since children ages ~3+ are likely less interested in nursery-forward styles and motifs. We also recently ran a Nursery Art challenge that Pottery Barn Kids also selected from.
Pottery Barn Teen will select pieces for children ages 9-12, teens, and college students. This age range is a huge opportunity for us!
We will accept both single-piece submissions and submissions that include 2-4 pieces that are intended to hang together. Pairs, Sets, and Gallery Walls must be submitted using one of our twelve submission templates located in the submission kit.
As always, we recommend focusing on quality over quantity and using polling and peer critique to not only narrow down the designs you submit, but also improve the quality of your work. We encourage you to take risks, try new things, and submit a variety of compositions.
