Applications for the 2024 New City Arts Fellowship are now open and due February 19, 2024 at 11:59PM. Learn more and apply below.

About the Fellowship

The New City Arts Fellowship creates space, time, and financial support for Charlottesville-area artists to make work in response to an annual open call and proposal theme. This year, the New City Arts Fellowship studio space will be located at The Underground: A Center for Creative Collaboration (The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative), an artist-run creative co-working space on the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville, Virginia. A cohort of 4 artist fellows will be selected with each artist receiving a month-long studio space grant, a $500 stipend, and a stocked pantry with their favorite drinks and snacks. The Fellowship season (March 2024 - July 2024) culminates in a group exhibition at Welcome Gallery in September 2024.

Learn more about past Fellowships and Artist Fellows here.

The 2024 New City Arts Fellowship is made possible with support from anonymous donors, the Anne and Gene Worrell Foundation, the Community Endowment Fund at the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation, Pam Sutton-Wallace and Maurice Wallace, and a partnership with The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative.

2024 Fellowship Theme: fallow

Building on land and climate-based projects from last season’s artist-led residencies and exhibitions, New City Arts invited 2023 Spring Resident Artist, MaKshya Tolbert to write this year’s Fellowship theme.

Inspired by the term “fallow,” an agricultural practice in which land is left uncultivated for the purpose of restoration, artists are encouraged to apply with considerations of their fallow place. These site-specific proposals may center any ‘place’ of significance (personal or otherwise). While a portion of the proposed project may take place off-site, each proposal should also include a brief description of how the work will be presented in an exhibition at Welcome Gallery in September 2024. Read the 2024 Fellowship theme and more about the program below:

fallow*

(adj.) pale yellow, brownish-yellow,
dusk-colored;
(n.) folded, turned, plowed earth,
land plowed but not planted;
(v.) to break up the land

Take us to your fallow place—that geographical, ecological, diasporic, and/or interior site where land, life, or living as you know it has folded, fallen apart, gone barren, turned over.

This open residency call emerges from worn earth, the aftermath of tobacco and wheat, and the wake of plantation life across and beyond Central Virginia. What happens if we meet at our wounds? What do we make, when repair is our imperative?

Our open call invites each of you to meet us at the intersection of ecological attention and creative placemaking, from the statue-less monument bases at “Emancipation Park” and on West Main Street, to West Main Street itself in the wake of Vinegar Hill’s razing, to those empty or weary places across our inner lives.

New City Arts invites artists of all mediums, practices, and ways of knowing to meet and gather in our “fallowship,” to see what and how we practice art when we set our intention to heed James’ Baldwin’s call to ‘begin again.’

Soon,

MaKshya Tolbert

*A note on method: This will take time.

Fellowship Requirements

Given that the core of our mission is to foster engagement with the arts in Charlottesville, Virginia, we ask that Artist Fellows:

Be living in the Charlottesville-area (including the City of Charlottesville, or Albemarle, Greene, Nelson, and Louisa counties) for the duration of the Fellowship.
Spend a minimum of 5-10 hours per week in the studio
Participate in a Fellowship group show in September 2024.

Fellowship artists must be available to occupy a studio space in-person for a duration of 4 weeks during the Fellowship period (March - July 2024) and in late August 2024 for the installation of the September 2024 Fellowship exhibition at Welcome Gallery.

Please note: Any project proposal that seeks to discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, sexual orientation, disability, or any other reason will not be considered.

About the Space

Fellowship artists are provided with a free, semi-private studio space at The Underground and free membership access to a wide-range of resources to support diverse creative practices. The Bridge’s studio space is located on the same street as New City Arts’ Welcome Gallery and office space where Fellows have access to staff support and additional resources. Read more about the Underground below:

The Underground: A Center for Creative Collaboration, is a 4,300 square foot creative center located at 306 Main Street on Charlottesville’s Historic Downtown Mall, and it is a major expansion of the initiatives and resources The Bridge has offered our community for nearly twenty years.

The Underground’s facilities offer a co-working space where artists can work in a diverse community of creatives. Free membership resources include a computer lab with Adobe and Microsoft subscriptions, and an equipment lab with everything from standard to specialty equipment for various creative practices.

Key Dates

Free Application Assistance Workshop: January 25, 2024 from 5:30 - 6:30PM (pizza provided); RSVP here!
Application Deadline: February 19, 2024 by 11:59PM
Fellowship Season: March - July 2024
Fellowship Exhibition: September 2024

Final decisions for the 2024 New City Arts Fellowship will be released in early March 2024.

How to Apply

Applications for the New City Arts Fellowship are due February 19, 2024 by 11:59PM.

Applicants are asked to fill out an online submission form via Google Forms where they will submit 2-3 artwork samples relevant to their project proposal according to the following guidelines:

IMAGES — JPEG file(s) up to 2MB each.
VIDEO or AUDIO — submit a PDF with link(s) to YouTube, Vimeo, or Soundcloud. MP3 files up to 3MB each are also acceptable for audio samples. Video and audio submissions must not exceed 3 minutes. If the sample exceeds 3 minutes, please note an up to 3-minute segment of the sample for review (i.e., minute 1:45-4:45)
TEXT — PDF files; total amount of words for all samples must not exceed 1800 words. For example, you could submit 3 samples of up to 600 words each. Alternatively, you could submit 1 sample that is up to 1200 words and another that is up to 600 words (if you only wanted to submit 2).

You may submit any combination of media types. All uploaded work sample files should be labeled according to the following format: FirstNameLastName_Title (ex: ToriCherry_Masterpiece).

Apply Here

Meet the Selection Committee

The selection committee tasked with selecting this year’s cohort of 4 Artist Fellows consists of MaKshya Tolbert, Jay Simple and Maurice Wallace.

Learn more about the Selection Committee Members below:

Jay Simple (he/him) is a son, a brother, a father, a friend, an artist, an activist, and a scholar led by his ancestors and Allah. He was born in the ghetto of the Universe, Earth, where he is currently trying to untangle himself from the degradation within the systems of his time. He is one dark body enduring attempts of being torn asunder and reveling in the eternal and multidimensionality of his radiant black nature.

He is the founder and director of The Photographer’s Green Book and serves as Executive Director of The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative and the Charlottesville Mural Project. He also sits on several boards including the Charlottesville Albemarle Convention & Visitors Bureau. He received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, a MLA from the University of Pennsylvania, and a BFA from Columbia College Chicago.

MaKshya Tolbert (she/they) is a poet, potter, and land worker who recently found their way back to Virginia. She serves on the Charlottesville Tree Commission, and is an MFA Candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. She has received fellowship support from Lead to Life, Tin House, Community of Writers, and New City Arts, where she was the 2022-2023 Spring Artist-in-Residence for New City Arts' Research Residency. In her free time, MaKshya is elsewhere— where Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. calls, 'that physical or metaphorical place that affords the space to breathe.’

Maurice Wallace (he/him) is a professor of English at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. He is co-editor with Shawn Michelle Smith of Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity and, most recently, author of King’s Vibrato: Blackness, Modernism and the Sonic Life of Martin Luther King Jr.