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Grants & Fellowship Opportunities

Art Design Chicago

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.

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. 

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
$75,000
Chicago, Illinois
2024

To support Andrea Carlson: Shimmer on Horizons, the first solo exhibition in a Chicago museum of work by Andrea Carlson, co-founder of the Center for Native Futures. Carlson’s art challenges colonial representations of Indigenous territories by incorporating references to her family, Ojibwe history, and symbols of Indigenous sovereignty. The exhibition includes video works, paintings, sculptures, and prints created over the past five years, with didactics presented in English, Spanish, and the Ojibwe language, Anishinaabemowin. 

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.  

Sixty Inches From Center
$25,000
Chicago, IL
2024

Sixty Inches From Center, in partnership with the Chicago Park District’s Arts & Culture Unit (ACU), produces a multi–author publication, Finding Ceremony, with art publisher For The Birds Trapped In Airports and editor Kamilah Rashied. The book chronicles ACU’s inaugural Anchor Curatorial Residency, awarded to Tiffany M. Johnson. Johnson’s residency and exhibition project at the Park District’s Austin Town Hall Cultural Center examined the tensions between safety, care, and the visibility of Black and Brown lives in the municipal space. The book offers a model of community-centered curation, showing how municipalities can leverage their structural, human, and natural resources to empower cultural workers and artists as interlocutors in collaboration with communities.   

National Public Housing Museum
$25,000
Chicago, IL
2024

The Making of the National Public Housing Museum is a multiauthor publication that documents the process of developing a museum centered on the voices and experiences of some of our nation’s most marginalized communities. Featuring essays and interviews, the book details how public housing residents inform the contents of the museum and the ways their stories are shared. Additionally, the book provides a visual narrative for exhibition strategies that embrace art and design and their role in shaping perceptions, knowledge, and emotion around such issues as race, class, gender, and other themes central to our common future, and that serve as a call to our nation. 

The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
$35,000
Chicago, IL
2024

The School of the Art Institute of Chicago is launching a seven-day workshop for college and university faculty and instructors, “Chicago Designs: New Approaches to Teaching Social History and Design,” which introduces participants to design-related archives and collections across Chicago. The project brings a critical eye to established design histories and reveals hidden narratives of labor and disability as well as other histories. Participants develop and share teaching resources (syllabi, teaching plans, assignment templates, bibliographies, etc.) based on collection materials, which are gathered on a public website in partnership with area archives and other collecting organizations. 

Hyde Park Art Center
$10,000
Chicago, IL
2024

Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) on Chicago’s South Side is introducing the series “Let’s Talk About Art,” a five-week program offering the 65+ community an opportunity to safely learn together, celebrate, and discuss projects and exhibitions that are part of Art Design Chicago. Students meet with the artists and designers behind these projects, participate in workshops, and create art inspired by what they have learned. HPAC aims to foster an environment that encourages older adults to connect with other lifelong learners, all while socializing and gaining exposure to the city’s vibrant art scene. 

The Newberry Library
$20,000
Chicago, IL
2024

The Newberry Library hosts three collaborative public programs that foreground overlooked and underappreciated aspects of contemporary arts in Chicago and strengthen relationships between the Newberry and stakeholders across Chicago’s contemporary art scene. The programs—“The Art of the Book in Chicago Collections,” “The Art of Memory: Everyday Life during the Pandemic,” and “Punk Photography, Art, and Design in Chicago”— are presented in person at the Newberry, as well as livestreamed and recorded for later viewing.