The Project/ Space Selected for 2026 In Fellowship Cohort by A Blade of Grass
On May 20, A Blade of Grass,an artist-led organization dedicated to nurturing socially engaged art, announced the 2026 In Fellowship cohort, which includes The Projects/Space!
This second edition of In Fellowship centers the act of gathering as a tool for building movements, distributing resources, and nurturing new futures. The three cohort members will explore artistic models in response to the conditions of our current moment. In this time of escalating crises, what structures are emerging, and what existing strategies are finding new relevance? How are artists bringing people together to further these goals?
“At A Blade of Grass, we are dedicated to supporting artists as organizers, facilitators, and cultural agents. At a time when many of our social and cultural infrastructures are strained or in collapse, we recognize the critical role of artists gathering people together as deliberate acts of resistance,” said Lu Zhang, Executive Director of A Blade of Grass. “This year’s cohort, Emily Johnson / Catalyst, The Projects/Space, and UNDOC+Collective, shows how artists are actively shaping the structures and strategies needed to build collective futures. We’re honored to be in fellowship with them over the course of this year. Supporting this work feels both urgent and hopeful
We are honored to be part of this cohort and to share space with artists committed to experimentation, cultural memory, and collective possibility.Our participation affirms the power of process-driven creative practice to nurture dialogue, deepen connection, and imagine more liberated futures together.
With grant funds, we are organizing The Practice of Otherwise, a gathering of Black artists from across the Southwest for connection, exchange, and collective sign up for our email list for updates.
Other fellows:
Emily Johnson / Catalyst (NYC, NY) is an artist who makes body-based work. Emily belongs to the Yup'ik Nation and is a land and water protector and an organizer for justice, sovereignty, and well-being. Since 1998, Emily's large-scale performance gatherings insist thrivance, radical reworlding, and just futures. Her gatherings function as portals and care processions, engaging audienceship within and through space, time, environment—interacting with a place's architecture, peoples, histories and role in building futures. Emily is trying to make a world where performance is part of life; where performance is an integral connection to each other, our environment, our stories, our past, present and future.
UNDOC+Collective (US) is a nationwide network dedicated to building knowledge, visibility, and sustainability for undoc+ (formerly or currently undocumented) creatives working across the contemporary art ecosystem. Grounded in the cultural competency, expertise, wisdom, and vision of undocumented creatives, UNDOC+Collective centers migratory lived experience as a site of knowledge production, artistic innovation, and future-making. Through exhibitions, publications, artist residencies, symposia, digital resources, and public convenings, UNDOC+Collective constructs collective knowledge that spotlights historically excluded undoc+ artistic practices and their intellectual contributions.
About the Funders
A Blade of Grass
A Blade of Grass (ABoG) is an artist-led organization dedicated to nurturing socially engaged art through funding, publishing, research, and field-building initiatives. Since 2011, we have supported artists who collaborate with communities to question and reshape power, build relationships, and bring people together across social systems and institutions. In 2021, we adopted a governance model led by a paid artist board, whose members bring lived experience as socially engaged practitioners. Our programs move resources nimbly, support emerging practices, and build long-term infrastructure for relational and durational work, recognizing artists as organizers, facilitators, and cultural agents embedded in community life.
Wagner Foundation
For more than two decades, Wagner Foundation has been committed to building healthier communities by investing in and accompanying organizations dedicated to health equity, economic wellbeing, and the transformative power of art and culture. Together with our partners in the US and around the world, we celebrate our shared humanity and strive for long-term solutions to some of our most complex global challenges. In our Art & Culture portfolio, we center artists as catalysts of change and community development through local and national investments in contemporary visual art exhibitions, publications, public art, and visual arts organizations at all scales.