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Grants & Fellowship Opportunities

Chicago

Museum of Vernacular Arts and Knowledge
$800,000
Chicago, IL
2025

To support organization planning and the expansion of the New Art School Modality (NASM), an innovative and affordable alternative to traditional art schools. NASM offers free or low-cost art and art history courses to a diverse community, emphasizing underrecognized art histories, forms, and learning methods. The program fosters collective teaching, intergenerational exchange, and collaborative approaches rooted in various cultural contexts.

Newberry Library
$25,000
Chicago, IL
2025

To support “Say It with Pictures: Black Photography, Chicago, and the Great Migration,” a project bringing together scholars, curators, and community members for a one-day in-person event at the Newberry Library in Chicago in the fall of 2025. This ongoing, multi-faceted project explores the under-recognized impact of African American commercial photographers working in Chicago between 1890 and the 1930s. Key topics of discussion include exhibition content and learning goals, publication content and format, strategies for community engagement, and areas for further scholarly exploration. This closed convening will inform an exhibition on view at the Newberry Library in 2027, shape an accompanying publication, and encourage participants to think expansively about “Say It with Pictures” as a collaborative, continuing project.

National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture
$25,000
Chicago, IL
2025

To support “Engage 2025,” a two-day convening tailored for artists and small arts organizations of the Puerto Rican diaspora, scheduled September 8–10, 2025. The conference features educational lectures, workshops, and artistic programming focused on Puerto Rican art history, archival practices, and cultural heritage preservation, alongside authentic cuisine, music, and performances. It focuses on the historical and cultural relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States, emphasizing the contributions of Puerto Rican artists in redefining American art through themes of identity, resistance, and diaspora experiences. Open to the public, the program will be livestreamed and recorded.

David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art
$200,000
Chicago, IL
2024

To support Theaster Gates: Unto Thee (working title), a mid-career survey of the artist and the first major museum presentation in his hometown of Chicago. It will include an installation of objects acquired by Gates from the University of Chicago, large-scale paintings, ceramic pieces, a film series, and a commissioned work that repurpose the former slate roof of the University’s Rockefeller Chapel for a site-specific installation. Catalog essays will situate Gates’s work within a larger art historical framework, with a special focus on his place in contemporary Black art and conceptual artistic practice.

National Museum of Mexican Art
$5,000
Chicago, IL
2024

The award helps cover expenses for the National Museum of Mexican Art’s (NMMA) Advancing Latinx Art in Museums (ALAM) curator, a position supported by the foundation. This grant supplements the foundation’s $495,000 grant to NMMA, which has allowed the museum to participate in ALAM, a multi-year initiative launched by the Mellon, Ford, and Getty foundations to bolster the field of Latinx art and to formalize curatorial positions focused on Latinx art at ten cultural organizations across the U.S. ALAM funders are providing travel and hotel stipends for ALAM curators to convene in New York City in 2024.

South Side Community Art Center
$50,000
Chicago, IL
2024

To present two convenings in early 2025 in conjunction with Art Design Chicago. The first is a daylong symposium that offers a sensory and aesthetic exploration of themes in the artist Charles White’s work, complemented by performances by the pianist and composer Gerald Clayton, who will present his original suite, “White Cities: A Tribute to Charles White,” a dialogue between two artists across time, exploring race and lived experiences in three American cities that were important to White (Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles).

The second is conference, “Beyond Frames: Celebrating and Empowering Black Women Art Collectors,” designed to inspire and equip Black women with the skills, resources, and knowledge needed to start or expand their art collections. The event addresses theories of collecting and the history and legacy of Black women collectors in Chicago with an emphasis on Margaret Burroughs’s significant role as a collector. It features panel discussions, workshops, and off-site collection tours, with a focus on art media, acquisition strategies, collection organization, and appraisal processes.

The Museum of Contemporary Photography
$8,000
Chicago, IL
2024

In conjunction with its Art Design Chicago exhibition Dawit L. Petros: Prospetto a Mare, the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) extends the term of the museum’s Community Engagement Fellow (Solome Bezuneh) by four months, through December 2024. As part of her fellowship, Solome has helped to plan programming for the exhibition, which features the work of Dawit Petros, an Eritrean-born artist based in Chicago whose project explores links related to colonization, migration, and modernism between Italy, East Africa, and Chicago. The fellow is fostering partnerships as well as planning and facilitating programs with the Eritrean and Ethiopian communities in Chicago, overseeing the planning of a workshop, and assisting with the coordination of a scholarly symposium to take place this fall. MoCP’s education staff was terminated in the staff reductions made across Columbia College Chicago (MoCP’s parent organization) this summer. The foundation’s supplemental award will help the museum welcome the public and engage audiences with the exhibition.

Black Lunch Table
$25,000
Chicago, IL
2024

To support Collective Recollections: Reflections on Black Creativity and Contemporary Art History Making, a three-day program focused on creating spaces for site-specific conversations exploring Black cultural praxis through the lens of archival practice and contemporary cultural history making. The five-part program consists of an artist talk, Archiving for Artists training session, portrait sessions, recorded community roundtable discussions, and an intimate “brain trust” gathering of Chicago-based artists, archivists, and cultural workers. Conversations will be recorded, transcribed, and added to Black Lunch Table’s open-access archive, and excerpts from the conversations and commissioned contributions from event guests will be included in a physical art book to be published in fall 2025.

Center for Native Futures
$200,000
Chicago, IL
2024

To support Center for Native Futures (CFNF) activities in 2025 and 2026, including exhibitions and programs featuring Native artists; the production of a publication documenting CFNF’s inaugural exhibition, Native Futures; and the third biannual Mounds Summit—a convening of artists and scholars from across the Great Lakes region and beyond dedicated to scholarship on Indigenous Futurisms and the contemporary art and creative practices of Native people.

Floating Museum
$285,000
Chicago, Illinois
2024

To support the development and pilot phase of the Burroughs Residency over three years, a new residency opportunity in Chicago for local and international artists that is highly tailored to the residents’ research needs and interests as well as to the interests of local cultural organizations that interact with the artists. A portion of the grant supports the organization’s operations and programmatic activity as well.

The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago
$25,000
Chicago, Illinois
2024

The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago seeks support for the publication The Hamza Walker Book of Essays, recognizing the curator’s significant contributions to the contemporary art field and ensuring his place in the art historical record. His essays explore complex art and its relevance to life and current events locally and globally. The first book dedicated to Walker’s writings, this volume collects essays that span two decades of his tenure at the Renaissance Society, where he served as Director of Education and Associate Curator. 

Chicago Public Art Group
$50,000
Chicago, IL
2024

The Chicago Public Art Group (CPAG) seeks support to preserve one of the earliest CPAG murals still extant and one of the few monumental murals created for a labor union, the Union Electrical Workers Mural (1973–74), also known as “Solidarity,” by CPAG cofounder John Pitman Weber and the late Jose Guerrero. Addressing such themes as resilience and the dignity of labor, and representing the story of the UE, industrial unionism, and related social movements, “Solidarity” reflects Chicago’s centrality to the revival of the mural movement of the 1960s and ’70s and is significant to the city’s art history and US labor history. The sale of the United Electrical Workers (UE) Hall at 37 S. Ashland Avenue necessitates moving the mural to preserve and conserve it—work to be carried out by Parma Conservation, after which it will be rehoused at the Chicago’s Teachers Union at 1901 West Carroll Street.