Image Description: Delicately drawn shapes and textures dance across a white background. The shapes range from long, elliptical pointed shapes, round spiky tufts, thin oblong clusters, large round hollow fluffs and strings of tiny pointed ellipses. Each pale yellow, green or blue shape is a flower of leaf drawn with black lines. In the left upper corner, floating above the delicately drawn leaves and flowers is a small pale yellow banner with thin green letters saying: CULTURE PUSH. Slightly below it, a larger medium pale green banner stretches across the page. The large banner has white letters saying: Fellowship for Utopian Practice.

Applications for the Spring 2024 Cycle are now open.

EXTENDED DEADLINE; March 18, 2024, 11:59 PM

APPLICATION GUIDELINES : FEllowship for utopian practice

APPLICATION GUIDELINES : CLIMATE JUSTICE FELLOWSHIP

About the Fellowship for Utopian Practice

Culture Push launched the Fellowship for Utopian Practice in 2012 to support boundary-pushing, interdisciplinary and socially engaged artwork. Our open call runs twice per year in Spring and Fall. Check the guidelines page for information on the next open call submission dates and application instructions. The Fellowship is a process-based program aimed at artists and other creative people who are seeking to test new ideas through civic engagement. Culture Push offers the Fellows concrete financial and institutional support, including feedback and mentoring, a stipend, and fiscal sponsorship for fundraising efforts, and heightened legibility, through support from the Culture Push institution. During the Fellowship year, Fellows collaborate with different communities and the Culture Push staff to find viable working methods for realizing ambitious hybrid projects. While Culture Push emphasizes the visual and performing arts, the Fellowship program is open to people working in any discipline aiming to expand their practice beyond its traditional borders.

2020 - 2021 Fellows, From Top Left to Bottom Right: ANGELA MISKIS, BIANCA MONA, Alexandra Hammond, DENNIS REDMOON DARKEEM, CODY HERRMANN, LUCA LEE, DOMINIKA KSEL, BL3SSING, SIMONE JOHNSON

Our current Fellows are gathering oral histories around food culture in NYC Bangladeshi communities; exploring the waterfront as a space of environmental and social resistance and freedom; working within communities directly affected by gun violence to think “beyond memorials”; preserving the images and stories of LGBTQIA+ elders in Harlem; and developing “a spa, a temple and a performance that merges African Traditional religious approaches to healing and Black feminist theologies to both envision and enact a more evolved world.”

In our first four years (2012-2016) Fellows created radical free libraries celebrating the history and work of black women; choreographed dances with individuals in solitary confinement; highlighted the stories of longtime residents in a neighborhood rapidly changing; led workshops exploring emergent communities through movement, art, and science; provided local artists with the resources and opportunities to create work in their own communities; engaged with community gardens; dissected the New York Times through a feminist lens; brought history to life through video art; empowered the goddess in queer girls; created a crowd-sourced map of a neighborhood; engaged with food and empowerment; explored the choreography of protest; theorized the theater of philosophical inquiry; re-imagined NYC's waterways; ideated social space in the Bronx; and collaborated with day laborers to create an app that identifies wage theft.

The Fellowship for Utopian Practice is supported, in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council and from the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation. The Fellowship is also made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
In-kind support provided by New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and other community partners.