Convening Grants

The Living New Deal (LND) is a digital humanities research and public education project that recovers and promotes New Deal (1933–1942) history. There is no art museum, scholarly journal, scholarly society, or research institute devoted to the New Deal. In response to these absences, LND launched in 2023 its Advocating for New Deal Art (ANDA) initiative, which cultivates relationships among the New Deal art studies community, creates space for the exchange of ideas, and leads advocacy efforts for historic preservation.

In 2025, ANDA hosted “Forgotten Federal Art Legacies: PWAP to CETA” (FFAL), a two-day, in-person convening at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Invited participants representing different disciplines and generations learned about the interconnections between New Deal funded art (1933–1942) and art funded by the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA, 1974–1982), the latter supporting a new generation of federally funded cultural workers who radically reimagined US art and art education in the 1970s. The event included lectures, New Deal and CETA art site tours, and roundtable discussions featuring CETA elders. Recordings of the talks and other CETA teaching resources are available through the LND website. Formal reflections by FFAL participants appear in the colloquium of the fall 2025 issue of Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art.

Mary Okin, LND Assistant Director, states, “Memory can be a powerful form of resistance. We hope our convening reminds others to study and host new opportunities to consider New Deal and CETA art history throughlines, to record and amplify the voices of our CETA elders, and to share the lessons they offer for our fraught present.”

The fourteenth iteration of “Black Portraitures” (BP) was the first of this series of convenings to be organized by NXTHVN. It took place on April 20–21, 2024, at the Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello during the vernissage of the Venice Biennale. The convening’s theme, “Shifting Paradigms,” centered thought leaders from Africa and the African Diaspora who are creating new models for the education, cultivation, exhibition, dissemination, and collection of art and images. The aim of the conference aligned with the Venice Biennale’s 2024 theme of “Foreigners Everywhere.” The panelists comprised a transnational list of artists, curators, art historians, writers, educators, collectors, gallerists, architects, and designers who use the experience of Blackness to facilitate new systems of knowledge within the field of art and storytelling. This version of BP broke new ground in numerous fields: exhibition making, visual studies, art history, cultural criticism, the art market, urban planning, and Africana Studies.

The curator and scholar Kalia Brooks commented that “‘Black Portraiture(s): Shifting Paradigms’ offered a critical space to reimagine how global Black experiences shape the visual field. In Venice, amid the Biennale’s international dialogue, we centered artists and scholars whose practices expand our collective understanding of representation, history, and belonging. The convening’s conversations demonstrated that shifting paradigms isn’t just an academic exercise—it’s a living practice of transformation.”