engaging artists commission

More Art’s Engaging Artists Commission is an opportunity for early career artists focused on the incubation and commissioning of a public art project and carries an $8000 award to realize the project, plus curatorial, conceptual, budgetary, and logistical mentorship.

What to expect

$8000 will be awarded to one socially-engaged art project to take place in a public space in New York City. The selected project must culminate in a public art installation, event, series, collaboration, or engagement in 2027.

More Art’s curatorial team will provide guidance in refining project concepts, developing public programming, and navigating the logistics of working in public space. Artists will also have opportunities to present their work in critical dialogues and events that further contextualize the project within broader conversations on history, memory, and social justice.

The EA Commission is open to early-career artists, including individuals and collectives, based in the U.S. with a demonstrated interest in public and socially engaged art. Prior experience working in public art is not required, but applicants should have a strong conceptual foundation and a commitment to engaging with communities through their work.

The project will begin with an incubation and research phase in September of 2026, leading to a launch in spring or summer 2027. Additional funding beyond the $8000 is not available, and artists are encouraged to take an honorarium for their work. As such, proposals should be scaled to appropriately reflect the calendar and budget offered for the commission.

2026/27 Theme: Inclusivity & the “I”

For 2027, More Art will focus our programs on the theme of “Inclusivity” across gender, age, race, disability, immigration status and other lived difference. The “I” of Inclusivity opens urgent questions about identity, immigration, intelligence, invisibility, and ignorance—forces that shape who is included, who is excluded, and under what conditions.

The rise of nationalism(s) across the globe, the expulsion of othered cultures, and the remaking of language around peace, war, social justice, and truth dominates our time. While the “I” gestures to the individual self and the heightened egocentrism of our current moment, we also look toward the possibility of a shared “I” of interdependence that reimagines responsibility, belonging, and agency beyond the singular individual.

For our 2027 Engaging Artists Commission, we invite proposals from artists working across media that critically and creatively engage with the tensions between self and collective, visibility and erasure, access and exclusion, knowledge and misinformation through ambitious, socially engaged public work. We are especially interested in proposals for projects that include sound, movement, spoken word, and other forms of ephemeral public intervention. The selected project may take place as part of a festival or a series of outdoor public activations in New York City.

Projects should be participatory, community-engaged, and rooted in dialogue, experimentation, and the thoughtful use of public space.