The Fine Arts Work Center (FAWC) in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and the Walker Youngbird Foundation will jointly launch a new residency program for Native artists beginning next spring.
Called the Walker Youngbird Native Artist Residency, the initiative will bring a Native artist to FAWC for four weeks (May 23–June 19). The Walker Youngbird Foundation will provide $10,000 for the inaugural year, $2,500 of which will go to the artist as a stipend. The chosen artist will also receive a private apartment and a 400-square-foot studio during their stay, as well as access to FAWC’s broader creative community and a closing public program.
“Provincetown is an epicenter for art in the United States,” Reid Walker, the foundation’s founder, told ARTnews. “We couldn’t think of a better spot than Provincetown to immerse a Native artist in a community that has such a long history, established presence, and great framework.”
FAWC executive director Sharon Polli said that over the past few years she has been “thinking about how we can open up that legacy—open up the opportunity to be in this place that sits at the epicenter of such an important art history—to the widest possible network of artists and writers who could really benefit from being in this landscape.”
They began thinking about “whose voices are missing and who might we most want to reach—and we can’t do that alone.” In the Walker Youngbird Foundation, they found a perfect partner: “There was no one better positioned to help us do that with intention, with care, and with real thought than Reid and his team.”
FAWC was founded in 1968 by a group of artists, including Robert Motherwell, to support artists and writers by giving them time and space to focus on their practice without pressure to produce anything. In 2024, the Motherwell estate gave $200,000 to the organization to support its months-long fellowship program, as well as its shorter summer workshops and residencies.
The latter program, which can last from two weeks to a month, helps “us reach a lot of artists that might not be able to spend seven months here and might need different things at different stages of their career,” Polli said.
No matter the length of the stay, Polli said, the emphasis is on letting artists and writers have “the opportunity to take risks, to experiment, to pilot new things and maybe fail, and to take their work in surprising new directions,” she said. “The secret sauce of our artist residencies is this idea of having time and space that is completely unrestricted. This resident will step right into that and have that same experience.”
The Walker Youngbird Native Artist Residency is the latest in the namesake foundation’s growing profile in supporting Indigenous artists. Earlier this year, it provided funds to launch Native Neon, a residency for a Native artist to produce a work in neon with Lite Brite Neon Studio in Kingston, New York. For that program, the Walker Youngbird Foundation gave $50,000 to cover production costs, travel, and lodging, and a $10,000 artist stipend.
“Our work really focuses on artists at inflection points, points where they are about to make a move into a new direction or jump into a bigger part of their career,” Walker said. “From my discussions with Native American artists who have done residencies, I’ve heard how important that time is—to reflect, to think about new ideas and new possibilities.”
He added, “The community that Fine Arts Work Center offers is important. It’s not just four weeks. It’s going to hopefully be a community that they will take with them long after they leave Provincetown.”
Applications for the four-week residency will open on October 26 and are open to emerging and mid-career Native and Indigenous artists working in any medium. (Artists must be 18 years or older and live in the US or Canada.) Walker will be joined on the selection committee by Mala Iqbal, an artist who chairs FAWC’s visual arts committee, and artist Duane Slick (Meskwaki and Ho-Chunk), a past FAWC fellow and current FAWC trustee. Per a release, the committee will select one artist “based on the strength and vision of the artist’s work and the potential for the residency to meaningfully advance their practice.”
“Native art is not just a sidebar in contemporary art; it’s a major foundational element, and it should be participating in the conversations that happen in art hot spots like Provincetown,” Walker said.