New City Arts 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.
About the Fellowship
Each year, Charlottesville-area artists are invited to submit proposals in response to an open call and proposal theme for the New City Arts Fellowship. Selected Artist Fellows are given studio space and a stipend to make work, with a requirement to use the studio space for at least 5-10 hours per week during their month-long fellowship. At the conclusion of the fellowship, work created by each Artist Fellow is presented in an exhibition.
The 2025 New City Arts Fellowship studio space is located at Visible Records, an artist-run studio and gallery space in the Woolen Mills neighborhood of Charlottesville, Virginia. A cohort of four artist fellows receive a month-long studio space grant, a $500 stipend, and a stocked pantry with their favorite drinks and snacks. The Fellowship season (March 2025 - July 2025) culminates in a group exhibition at Welcome Gallery in September 2025.
Applications for the 2025 Fellowship are now open and due by February 3, 2025.
2024 Fellowship Theme
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:
Theme: fallow written by MaKshya Tolbert
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.
2024 Artist Fellows
2023 New City Arts Fellowship
Theme: Soft Spot written by Marisa Williamson
This open call invites artists to consider the ways their work reveals unseen openings, sites of ongoing growth, unfused structures, and delicate parts that require gentleness and care.
Babies are born with soft spots on their heads. These soft spots allow us to escape the womb. They allow our minds to grow beyond that initial trauma. What soft spots do we still have hidden in our minds and bodies despite hardening to an adult world? Simultaneously, the soft spot is a metaphor.
This call invites artists from across disciplines into creative fellowship in order to cultivate and share their soft spots. A group exhibition that honors and investigates the power of this tenderness will be curated from what they produce.
Selection Committee
Jess Walters, Marisa Williamson, Morgan Ashcom
2023 Artist Fellows
2022 New City Arts Fellowship
Theme: Meantime written by Tori Cherry
Despite the progress achieved through decades of protest and activism, systemic racism persists today through covert means. It is engrained within institutions and sociopolitical systems that perpetuate issues of access, representation, and discrimination. It will require more time, effort, and difficult conversations to make the changes we hope to see in our future. This year’s theme is about what we do in the Meantime. Resilience has empowered communities not just to survive, but to thrive in the face of hate, violence, and prejudice, and time and time again find the energy necessary to fight another day. Considering care and self-preservation as acts of resistance in themselves, how are we to care for ourselves and our communities until we reach that imagined future?
New City Arts invites artists to contemplate the following questions: Where do you find rejuvenation and healing? What are your means of self-preservation—both physical and psychological? What makes you feel most supported? How are you sustaining your community and caring for yourself in the Meantime?
We invite artists to consider everyday sounds, interactions, movements, and objects as they relate to rejuvenation, healing, and resilience. Works might explore these themes through one or more of the following contexts: history, religion, justice, education, health, environment, design.
Selection Committee
Ashon Crawley, LaRissa Rogers, Marisa Williamson
2022 Artist Fellows
2021 New City Arts Fellowship
Theme: Next Breath: History, Hate, Possibility written by Maurice Wallace
Today, many Americans are registering their outrage at systematic racism, especially as the public murders of George Floyd and Eric Garner by violent asphyxiation recall a real and metaphorical history of race, criminality and suffocation. African Americans’ struggle to freely breathe in real and metaphorical ways is not new but now coincides with a dangerous virus that risks compromising everyone’s ability to breathe who contracts it even as it disproportionately impacts those in vulnerable communities susceptible to chronic illness and death.
New City Arts invites artists to submit proposals with work that deeply and imaginatively related to or addressed “breath” as the essence of life and freedom. What materials, sounds, and movements best aid the visualization or vocalization of breath as critical to our common survival? How does the present COVID-19 pandemic complement or complicate the urgency of breath and a climate conducive to respiratory health and flourishing? Conversely, how might we imagine breath joyfully? As celebration, bliss, vitality?
We invite artists to consider everyday sounds, movements, and objects (masks, inhalers, filters, ventilators, fans, flags, chimes, weathervanes, garden spinners, plants, etc.) as well as public landmarks (statues, windmills, towers, tunnels, parks, amphitheaters, etc.) as they relate to breath, existence, belief, and daily life. Works might explore breath in one or more of the following contexts: biology, justice, climate, health/illness, environment, fashion, housing, design, history, religion.
Selection Committee
Maurice Wallace, Sarah Boyts Yoder, Horace Ballard
