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Grants & Fellowship Opportunities

Chicago

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. 

Enrich Chicago
$55,000
Chicago, IL
2024

The service organization Enrich Chicago works to dismantle racist systems in the arts through its professional development programs and research for the local arts sector.  The foundation’s grant supports Enrich’s current research project, “Portrait of Inequity 2.0,” which is assessing progress toward racial equity in Chicago’s arts ecosystem over the last five years and identifying accountability standards for use by the arts sector. Additionally, the grant helps to support Enrich’s operating expenses over two years. 

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
$20,000
Champaign, IL
2024

The publication Supergraphic Landscapes (Applied Research and Design Publishing) is a collaboration between architect Joseph Altshuler and graphic designer Nekita Thomas, both public art practitioners and faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, featuring contributions from other designers as well. The book traces the lineages of creative placemaking and chronicles contemporary public art practices and strategies that blend graphic design, architecture, and landscape architecture primarily in Chicago’s South and West Sides, analyzing public art’s role in fostering identity, access, and a sense of belonging. Through case studies and analysis, the authors aim to develop a resource for the arts and design fields, showing how discipline–spanning public art practices can help reimagine public spaces and a more liberatory city. 

Urban Gateways
$25,000
Chicago, IL
2024

The youth-led webzine MILDSAUCE: The Art and Fashion Issue explores the question, “How Does Art Influence Fashion and Vice Versa?” and considers the impact of art and fashion on Chicago artists Nick Cave and the late Virgil Abloh. The young journalists use various media and processes (interviews, writing, video, and podcasting) to tell stories intended to delve deeply into the relationships between contemporary art and fashion in Chicago.