A Message from Our Programs Team
Thank you for joining us for our Neighborhood Clinic Healing Installations and Instagram Live Open Studios and Open Rehearsals. After a tough year, having the opportunity to connect with you to celebrate cultural heritage and creativity has been truly uplifting. We also extend our heartfelt gratitude to the participating artists and organizations, including Tatiana Arocha, Brujas of Brooklyn, Nana Chinara, Neil Clarke, Ifetayo Cultural Arts Academy, Katherine Kisa, Nate Martinez, Neel Murgai, Nedelka Prescod, and Renata Škobo of Rosa Vocal Group. We look forward to hosting more in-person and virtual programs in the coming months!
Additionally, be sure to keep an eye out for more information on upcoming funding opportunities for artists, arts organizations, and Cultural Heritage practitioners including:
Creative Equations Fund - guidelines, applications, & information sessions.
Learn More2022 Community Arts Grants - Brooklyn Arts Fund & Local Arts Support guidelines, applications, & information sessions
New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) City Artist Corps - information sessions, application cycle 2 (opens July 6) & cycle 3 (opens July 27).
Learn MoreNew York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) Restart NY - A total of $2M will be regranted through Statewide Community Regrants to boost the local arts sector. More information coming soon.
Learn More
Check our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter to stay up-to-date on all announcements.
Now Hiring: Grant Writer
A key member of the Development & External Affairs team, the Grant Writer will work collaboratively and creatively to increase support for and awareness of the arts in Brooklyn. The Grant Writer is primarily responsible for all aspects of researching, developing, and writing grant proposals and reports to foundations, corporations, and government entities, and will persuasively communicate BAC’s mission and programs to potential funders.
Events, Artist Opportunities & Resources from Our Grantees & Many Other Organizations!
We are excited to share upcoming events, reliable funding, artist opportunities, and other resources from our grantees, fiscal sponsees as well as external organizations. Keep scrolling for a full, comprehensive list of what's top-of-mind this July.
Our Grantees' Events
Upcoming in-person & virtual events hosted by our grantees & fiscal sponsees.
Kyoung's Pacific Beat's "Community Cares"
July 10
3 PM - 5 PM
Downtown Brooklyn's Albee Square
Inspired by Kyoung’s Pacific Beat’s ongoing community-based dialogues, “Whiteness on Fire,” our theater company is hosting its first, live event since the theater shutdown in March 2020. In partnership with GAPIMNY (Gay Asian Pacific Islander Men of New York) and The Exponential Festival, Kyoung’s Pacific Beat invites its community members to gather at Albee Square in Downtown Brooklyn to ask: “What does Community Safety look like to you?”
Kyoung’s Pacific Beat will invite BIPOC healing and performance artists, and local community members to engage in somatic healing exercises, enjoyment of non-Western cultural expressions, and share stories from their cultures of origin through an open mic session. In addition to our cultural programming, Kyoung’s Pacific Beat will lead a mutual aid drive to provide pre-packaged food and water local community members.
Coney Island Reggae: Reggae Under The Bridge
July 11
2 PM - 7PM
370 Scott Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11237
A Reggae DJ soundsystem party featuring vinyl DJs playing on a large, Jamaican soundsystem. Coney Island Reggae On The Boardwalk is an all vinyl soundsystem series held at Coney Island, Brooklyn, four times each summer since 2010.
Premiere of Unforgotten: Renwick Ruin
July 15
12 PM
Webinar
Join us for the premiere of Unforgotten: Renwick Ruin with artist Aaron Asis who was given special access inside the abandoned structure and Stephen Martin founder of Friends of the Ruin.
Learn about the past, present, and future of the Ruin and Roosevelt Island
See rare video and photographic imagery from inside the remnant structure
Hear experts discuss the Ruin's value, vision, ongoing preservation efforts
The Renwick Ruin was built in 1856 on the southern end of Roosevelt Island as part of a series of prisons and hospitals constructed on the island during that time. Designed by architect James Renwick, Jr. as the nation’s first hospital dedicated to the treatment of smallpox, the structure is breathtaking in its abandonment and stands as our only landmarked ruin. But as the building slowly deteriorates, efforts to stabilize the structure and increase access highlight the importance of preserving this rare piece of history.
FAILSPACE 2021 Mentorship Workshops
Stacy Skolnik / Jonathan Gonzalez
July 19 - 23
Daily from 10 AM - 2 PM
Prospect Park Peninsula
This workshop invites participants of any medium and skill set to convene for improvisatory and discursive gatherings in an open-air setting. By way of establishing/editing/excising our vested creative interests and citational principles through processes of sharing aloud (as in a reading, a dance, a sound played over a speaker, a fleeting refrain), “co-authoring” will be a methodology we come to define collectively.
Lisa Fagan / Juliana F. May
July 26 - 30
Daily from 9 AM - 12 PM
Target Margin Theater
232 52nd St
Brooklyn, NY 11220
This workshop will steer us directly into the challenge of re-encountering a physical choreographic practice after a year or more away and/or distanced. We will move and make after prolonged inactivity, pain, anxiety and loss, and in our gathering, we will welcome ungrounded, bizarre, and new feelings that arise. The workshop will hold space to include the individual ways we have been shaped during the pandemic in order to find our collective way through to embodying reimagined practices. This workshop meets people wherever they are and whomever they are becoming.
African Peach Arts Coalition: Mini BazART Block Party DUMBO
July 31
2 PM - 8 PM
19 Dock Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
The Mini BazART block social is a mid-summer mini-fest happening in Dumbo, one of the most picturesque neighborhoods in the Brooklyn borough. Registration is now open for vendors, poets, and music performers.
Chloë Bass: The Parts
The Parts, Chloë Bass. Image by Gregg Richards.
Chloë Bass is a 2021 Brooklyn Arts Fund grantee. Stay connected via Instagram.
On view until September 20
Center for Brooklyn History
128 Pierrepont Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
Presented by the BKLYN Public Library, The Parts is a multiform project by artist Chloë Bass. The Parts consists of images from the artist’s daily life and reflective personal texts, which reside at the intersection of aphorism, diary entry and prose poetry. The project considers the many registers of personal and public experience, as they become living history. Taken together, each element of The Parts develops an alternative archive capturing and processing the shared context of national current events, including the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, social resistance movements, and pandemic flashpoints.
Events & Programs
Additional happenings hosted by outside organizations, collectives, and institutions.
bklyn public library: Brooklyn Resists
Photo by Jon Vachon.
On view until September 20
Center for Brooklyn History
128 Pierrepont Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
Brooklyn Resists tells the stories of Black Brooklynites and how they have responded to systemic racial injustice, risen up against those systems, and how the protest movement of the present ties to the generations of activists and leaders who came before.
Performing Outdoors: How to Bring Your Art to Parks, Plazas, and Streets
July 27
1 PM - 2:30 PM
Webinar
Learn practical strategies to help you bring music, theater, and dance to where people already are: public spaces. The workshop is geared toward artists and event producers in New York City looking to create and perform outdoors. By the end of the webinar, you will understand the various types of city event permits, consider strategies for what to do in adverse weather situations, and hear ideas for how to manage technical production on a limited budget.
Creative capital
Creative Evolutions:
Performing Artists Straddling the Stage and Screen
July 15
4 PM - 5PM
Webinar
Shanta Thake, of the Public Theater, will moderate a conversation between Creative Capital Awardees Raja Feather Kelly, Faye Driscoll, and Carmelita Tropicana about how performance transformed over the past year to include digital variations.
Creative Evolutions:
Artist Roles in Reimagining the Social
July 29
4 PM - 5PM
Webinar
Kenneth Bailey of the Design Studio for Social Intervention discusses the "Ideas-Arrangements-Effects" methodology and how artists can lead the way in imagining more just and vibrant arrangements for everyday life. Artists Tiago Gualberto and Marina Zurkow will share their artistic social justice projects, uncovering the overlaps of insight and impact that come about when these two fields meet.
Artist Opportunities
Reliable workshops and funding opportunities from outside collectives and institutions.
TAWCS Space Rental in DUMBO
TAWCS website.
52 Bridge Street
Corner of Bridge Street & Water Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
TAWCS is looking for an artist or collective to fill their rental space for the month of July! Artists will need to pay $250 per week and must have their own liability insurance. They will have access to the building throughout the week and weekends. The space can be used for performance, gallery, or practice. Artists are welcome to have an opening, but hours are limited since residents are above the space. If they do have an opening they will need a $500 refundable deposit if the space is returned clean.
For questions and additional information, please contact Lisa Scott at lisa@tawcs.org.
Open Calls
Killens Review of Arts & Letters
Deadline: July 12
The Killens Review of Arts & Letters is published twice a year by the Center for Black Literature. The publication is a peer-reviewed journal that seeks short stories, essays, nonfiction, poetry, art, photography, and interviews related to the various cultural, sociopolitical, and historical experiences of writers and artists from the African Diaspora, as well as the African continent. The aim is to provide accomplished and emerging writers, as well as educators and students, with opportunities to create and expand the canon of literature produced by writers and artists of African ancestry.
OAK SPRING GARDEN FOUNDATION:
2022 Eliza Moore Fellowship for Artistic Excellence
$10,000
Deadline: July 15
The Oak Spring Garden Foundation will award their annual Eliza Moore Fellowship for Artistic Excellence to one outstanding, early-career artist who is developing new works that address plants, gardens, or landscapes in the broad sense. This is our most prestigious artist award and is open to visual artists, literary artists, dancers, and musicians. This fellowship will be granted to an exceptional artist who shows remarkable promise to contribute to a deeper understanding of the natural world, and humankind’s place in it.
CEC ArtsLink’s 8th Art Prospect Festival: Forms of unity
Image: Imaginary Itinerants, project by Victoria Myronyk, Ukraine, with the participation of students of the Naukma Theater. Kyiv, Ukraine, Art Prospect Festival 2018. Photographer Alexander Kovalenko.
Deadline: July 10
CEC ArtsLink invites artists from around the world (with the exception of St. Petersburg, Russia), to propose public art projects examining how contemporary art organizations engage, support and unite local communities. The 8th Art Prospect Festival will include twenty projects by artists from around the world, created in collaboration with local arts organizations, as well as an on-site Festival of public art at the Gaza Palace of Culture in St. Petersburg.
Grants & Funding
Manhattan Arts Grants
Up to $10,000
Deadline: September 14
Since 1983, LMCC’s Manhattan Arts Grants have supported Manhattan-based artists, arts groups and community-focused organizations in sharing rich arts activities with the public. The 2022 Manhattan Arts Grants are designed to support Manhattan artists and organizations in accessing public funds for presentations that respond to the current needs of our local communities and amplify the cultural breadth and identity of our city.
Common Field Convening Support Grant
Applications Open: July 12
For this year’s Common Field Convening, we’ve recalibrated our Convening scholarship program to accommodate the realities of a coordinated shift to online space. Our Support Grant initiative will provide participants with unrestricted financial support to offset costs associated with lost income, childcare, technology, and other barriers to virtual attendance, in addition to free Convening registration. Sign up for the newsletter for updates.
NYSCA Funding: Organizational and Individual Artist Recovery
Applications Open: July 19
Deadline: September 1
Support will broaden individual artist support and deliver extremely flexible funding for organizations through a streamlined application experience. Grants offered in this round will greatly expand eligibility and encourage new applicants across a wide spectrum of artistic and cultural practices. Priority will be given to applicants that serve historically underrepresented communities. Funding opportunities include: Support for Organizations, Support for Artists, Special Opportunities, and the NYSCA Recovery Fund.
Queens Council on the Arts:
Artist Commissioning Program (ACP)
$2,000 and $10,000
Deadline: July 12
The Artist Commissioning Program (ACP) democratizes the traditional commissioning progress by enabling local community members, or “art commissioners,” to fill gaps in American culture by awarding commissions to Queens artists. The 2021-22 ACP will fund choreographers, dance artists, and small dance organizations to tell untold stories that highlight underrepresented protagonists. By commissioning artists to materialize works that resonate with Queens communities, the ACP aims to create a cultural sector more reflective of the diversity of the borough and the nation.
city Artist Corps
$5,000
Application Cycle 2 Opens: July 6
Application Cycle 2 Deadline: July 20
Application Cycle 3 Opens: July 27
Application Cycle 3 Deadline: August 10
City Artist Corps Grants is part of City Artist Corps, a new $25 million recovery initiative designed to help artists who were both hard hit by the pandemic and who may have been left out of other local and federal funding opportunities.
City Artist Corps Grants are intended to support NYC-based working artists who have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. The program will distribute one-time $5,000 grants to over 3000 artists to help sustain their practice and engage the public across New York City’s five boroughs this summer beginning July.
bronx cultural visions fund
$10,000 for Concept Development
$20,000 for Production
Deadline: August 2
The Bronx Cultural Visions Fund (BCVF) seeks to support the development of new ideas and the production of new work in the performing arts, including but not limited to dance, music, theater, performance art, and multi-disciplinary performance work. Open to Bronx-based emerging and mid-career individual artists and organizations with budgets up to $250,000, BCVF awards are intended to have a meaningful impact on an artist’s career or an organization’s development.
Pandemic Small Business Recovery Grant PRogram
$5,000 - $50,000
Rolling
The $800 million COVID-19 Pandemic Small Business Recovery Grant Program provides grant funding to small and micro businesses and for-profit independent arts and cultural organizations impacted by the pandemic. The grants will be flexible and can be used for a number of different business operating expenses, including payroll, rent or mortgage payments, taxes, utilities, PPE or other business expenses incurred between March 1, 2020 and April 1, 2021.
Residencies
SHIFT: A Residency for Arts Workers
Honorarium: $1,000
Deadline: July 25
EFA Project Space’s SHIFT: A Residency for Arts Workers is now seeking applications from artists who work at NYC-based cultural organizations. SHIFT: A Residency for Arts Workers supports NYC-based artists who are also arts workers through a 6 month long cohort-focused dedicated residency program focused on professional development and creative practices, while advocating for artists as arts workers in the field.
Tusen Takk’s residencies
Honorarium: $625 per week
Deadline: July 15
Tusen Takk’s residencies are geared for artists to explore new ideas or expand current work. We look for ideas and work that will affirm and enrich the human spirit, giving form to chaos and perception to beauty. The single most important qualification for artists invited to Tusen Takk is that they have created a body of work that exemplifies excellence and has (or could) significantly contribute(d) to their artistic field.
Additional Resources
HueArts NYC
HueArts NYC will be a comprehensive map, online directory, report, and hub for New York City’s arts entities that have been created by and center Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, and all People of Color. Covering all five boroughs and featuring nonprofits, fiscally sponsored, and for profits, this map aims to highlight these performing and presenting arts entities’ work, amplify their impact, and increase support for their critical contributions to city life. HueArts NYC will provide a rich and living visual and textual record that helps advance racial and cultural equity. The map, directory, and report will be completed and publicly released in December 2021.
Asian American Performers Action Coalition (AAPAC):
The Visibility Report - Racial Representation on NYC Stages
AAPAC’s ‘The Visibility Report - Racial Representation on NYC Stages’ covers employment statistics by race for all shows that opened on Broadway and at the 18 largest non-profit theatre companies in the 2018-19 New York season—the last full season before the Covid-19 pandemic. The report tracks actors, playwrights, composers, librettists, lyricists, directors, artistic directors, designers, Broadway producers, general managers, and board members at non-profit theatre companies. This year, the report provides an in-depth analysis of racial equity in arts funding, the first report to do so for New York City.
NYC Office of Nightlife Report 2018-2021
The NYC Office of Nightlife (ONL) at the Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment released their inaugural report that documents its activities and accomplishments as well as recommendations for new programs and initiatives to be implemented in the coming years.
These ongoing and proposed initiatives are the result of stakeholder engagement; constituent services casework with nightlife businesses, workers, and neighbors; focus groups to solicit detailed feedback regarding the issues and challenges facing New York nightlife; in-depth research of national and global best practices; and extensive partnership with other government agencies.
What We're Reading
Have you encountered an inspiring or engaging read related to the COVID-19 era lately? Tell us about it at webmaster@brooklynartscouncil.org.
Bishara, Hakim. “Williamsburg Gets Its First Hasidic Art Gallery,” Hyperallergic. June 2021.
Read
Dilenschneider, Coleen. “DATA UPDATE: Can Cultural Entities Remove Mask Policies Now?",” Know Your Own Bone. June 2021.
Read
McShane, Julianne. “How Basquiat and Street Artists Left Their Mark on Hip-Hop Culture,” New York Times. June 2021.
Read
Miller, M.H. “The Art World Returns to a New Normal,” New York Times. June 2021.
Read
Yablonsky, Linda. “A ghost forest and a predator: New York public art grows a conscience,” The Art Newspaper. June 2021.
Read
Help Sustain Brooklyn's Artists
During times of uncertainty, Brooklyn Arts Council depends increasingly upon community members like you to help us continue celebrating and empowering local artists.
Cover Image: The Vex Collection. Photo by Walter Wlodarczyk, 2019.