incubation award

Idle Hands invites emerging and mid-career artists based in New York City (all five boroughs eligible) to apply for the Idle Hands Incubation Award, offering a $10,000 unrestricted stipend, professional mentorship, and a culminating exhibition in our Williamsburg, Brooklyn loft space.

Theme: Tactility

For this award cycle, Tactility is approached through the lens of time-based media, including film, video, sound, and other durational practices. Within this context, tactility refers to how sensory experience, embodiment, and material presence are conveyed, simulated, or questioned over time.

Artists may engage, but are not limited to, exploring the theme by addressing: 

• The relationship between bodies, surfaces, and movement

• Sensory perception beyond the purely visual, including sound, rhythm, and duration

• The translation of physical experience into mediated or recorded formats

• Gesture, labor, repetition, and process as temporal acts

• Haptic illusion, proximity, or friction within moving images or sound

• The memory, absence, or deferred experience of touch

Projects need not involve literal touch or physical materials. Conceptual, abstract, or digitally mediated works are welcome, provided that questions of embodiment, sensory encounter, or material presence unfold through time.

Timeframe

• Award Period: May 1- August 2, 2026

• Exhibition / Public Presentation: July 31 – August 2, 2026