A Blade of Grass is Now Accepting Applications for their 2019 Fellowship
The ABOG Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art supports courageous artists in creating exchanges, experiences, and structures to enact social change.
About the Fellowship
ABOG believes in the power of socially engaged artists to participate meaningfully in creating a more just, equitable, sustainable, joyful, and compassionate future. They know this means that artists must take time and care to develop relationships built on mutual trust, as well as work with diverse non-arts partners and communities. They understand there are no ready-made roadmaps or guaranteed outcomes for this type of work, and are committed to learning how artists navigate these processes and relationships.
Their fellowship program is meant to support courageous artists in creating exchanges, experiences, and structures that highlight seemingly intractable social problems, inspire audiences, and energize folks to participate in and sustain long-term social change work. This is hard and time-consuming organizational, intellectual, and emotional work.
For these reasons, beginning this year they are separating their financial support to fellows from their content and audience-building work for the field into two separate programs. This decision reflects their dual commitment to supporting artists who engage in high risk and high trust work that wouldn’t benefit from increased visibility of the process, as well as to producing high quality video, web, and print content, and experiences that push the discourse and expand audience for the field of socially engaged art.
They are committed to providing relatively unrestricted funding that incorporates a collaborative research component. Field research conducted by ABOG’s Director of Field Research replaces grant reporting written by the artist, and is grounded in the goals and areas of inquiry defined by the artist and the perspective of project participants.
Selected Fellows will receive:
- $20,000 in minimally restricted support
- Comprehensive written Field Research Reports that utilize action research methodology
- Expenses Paid 2-day Orientation Retreat in NYC to engage a cohort of peer artists and ABOG staff and board (a requirement for the fellowship)
- Ongoing invitations to networking events for all ABOG Fellows and Alumni twice annually (attendance voluntary)
- Ongoing promotion of fellow’s projects through ABOG social media networks and website
- In addition to direct artist support, another primary goal of ABOG is to make the “invisible” parts of socially engaged art visible. We do this through documentary films, publications, web content, and public programming.
Fellowship Projects may become the focus of ABOG content and programming including:
- Curriculum and advocacy that advance the field of socially engaged art
- Inclusion in our new biannual periodical (available in print and free online)
- Participation in documentary videos focused on curatorial themes of interest to the field
- Other web content (podcasts, interviews, critical essays)
- Participation in ongoing public programs