Sunday, November 25, 2012

The Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, Massachusetts

The Fine Arts Work Center offers a unique residency for writers and visual artists in the crucial early stages of their careers. Located in Provincetown, Massachusetts, an area with a long history as an arts colony, the Work Center provides seven-month Fellowships to twenty Fellows each year in the form of living/work space and a modest monthly stipend. Residencies run from October 1 through May 1. Fellows have the opportunity to pursue their work independently in a diverse and supportive community of peers. A historic fishing port, Provincetown is situated at the tip of Cape Cod in an area of spectacular natural beauty, surrounded by miles of dunes and National Seashore beaches.

Program: Fellows are expected to live and work in Provincetown during the fellowship year. Optional group activities provide Fellows with the opportunity to meet program committee members as well as visiting artists and writers. The Stanley Kunitz Common Room is the site of frequent presentations by distinguished guests as well as readings by writing Fellows. Visual arts Fellows present shows in the Work Center's Hudson D. Walker Gallery. Visiting artists and writers engage in dialogue with the Fellows throughout the year. The Fine Arts Work Center also seeks to identify local and national venues for Fellows and former Fellows to share their work.

Facilities: Visual arts Fellows are provided with apartments and separate working studios of approximately 400 square feet of floor space. Additional facilities include a basic woodshop, a print shop with etching press and a large format digital printer. Writing Fellows are housed in two- to three-room apartments. The Stanley Kunitz Common Room is handicapped accessible, as are two living spaces and several working studios.

UPDATED GUIDELINES FOR 2013-2014 VISUAL ARTS FELLOWSHIP APPLICATION
Applications for the 2013-2014 Visual Arts Fellowship must be completed and submitted electronically on or before 11:59 pm February 1, 2013. The application fee is $57. All applications must be submitted online. To submit your application, go to http://fawc.slideroom.com. Applications will be available by November 15th, 2012.

Fellowship

The Fine Arts Work Center provides seven-month Fellowships to ten emerging artists and ten emerging writers each year from Oct.1 through April 30. Visual Arts Fellows are provided with a private, furnished apartment, a separate work studio of approximately 400 sq ft and a monthly stipend of $750. More information regarding the Fellowship program and our facilities can be seen in our ABOUT section.

Eligibility

The Fellowship is open to all emerging visual artists creating two-dimensional, three-dimension and time-based work. Applicants are judged on the quality of their work. The jury disqualifies applicants it deems to be already emerged. Tenure track professors in Fine Arts who are on sabbaticals are considered ineligible.

Collaborative teams may apply under one application and if selected they will only be awarded one Fellowship to share. Applicants who would like to apply as an individual artist as well as part of a collaborative team may do so if these two bodies of work are completely different and distinctive.

Artists must be in residence during their Fellowships. Absences may not exceed more than fourteen consecutive days or total more than thirty days during the seven-month Fellowship. Please consider any personal or professional commitments you have made or anticipate before applying. The Fine Arts Work Center welcomes family members and partners of Fellows during the Fellowship Term. There is one pet-friendly apartment available for a Visual Artist.

International applicants are welcome to apply. The Fine Arts Work Center actively seeks applicants from all backgrounds, and does not discriminate on the basis of race, creed, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, sexual orientation, marital status, ancestry, disability, HIV status or veteran status.

APPLICATION GUIDELINES:

Our application does not require recommendations or artist statements. It entails a simple questionnaire, a space for listing artistic/professional experience and work samples. Any essential information about your work can be pasted into the description box upon uploading each work sample. Please do not list your name in your resume, description boxes, or in any of your work samples (including title and credit screens) or descriptions as the jury is anonymous, and applicants are identified by work sample ID.

Experience: You will be asked to paste a resume or brief list of artistic/professional experience of no more than three pages total. If your application advances to the final round the Visual Coordinator and Committee Chair will review your professional/artistic experience provided to confirm your eligibility.

Work Samples:

Applicants should upload the following:

IMAGES: 10 JPGS, (5MB maximum for each image)

VIDEO:
up to 5 minutes total of video of time based work such as film, video and animation (maximum of 61 MB for each file; accepted formats are mov, wmv, flv and mp4). If you are submitting more than one work, we suggest uploading separate files due to size constraints.

BOTH: You may submit a combination of both images/video using the following equation 1 image= 30 seconds of video. (For example 6 image and 2 minutes of video)

Note: SlideRoom allows up to 20 work sample submissions because our selection entails multiple rounds. Only the first 10 work samples/5 minutes of video will be considered in the first round. If selected as a finalist you’re application you will have the opportunity to add more images/video and edit/reorder your portfolio.

Former or current Fellows who would like to apply for a Second Year should notify the Visual Arts Coordinator. Second Year applicants should upload the following:

20 JPG images, (5MB maximum for each image)

OR 10 minutes total of video of time based work such as film, video and animation (maximum of 61 MB for each file; accepted formats are mov, wmv, flv and mp4).

Or a combination of both using the following equation 1 image= 30 seconds of video. (For example 8 images and 6 minutes of video)

Fee:

The fee for visual arts online submission process is $57 payable by credit card. This includes FAWC’s $45 application fee plus SlideRoom’s $12 usage fee.

Former or current Fellows applying for a Second year fellowship are only required to pay the $12 usage fee, paid directly to FAWC by cash or personal check.

Notification:

All applicants will be notified via email whether or not their application has advanced to the final round in mid March. The finalists are then invited to supplement their portfolio on SlideRoom by uploading up to ten additional images/5 minutes of video. While these extra work samples are not required, applicants must resubmit their application online before April 15th for the final jury. All finalists who are selected as Fellows in the final round will receive notification in early May. Please contact the Visual Coordinator if you change the email address that you listed on your SlideRoom application.

SELECTION:

Composition of Juries: The Visual Arts Committee Chair, with the assistance of the Visual Coordinator, enlists and instructs the Visual Committee members in the first jury round. Visual Committee members are practicing accomplished artists, including but not limited to former Fellows of the Fine Arts Work Center. The Visual Chair, the Visual Coordinator, and the second-year Visual Fellows serve in the first jury round.

For the second and final round of the jury, the Visual Chair with the help of the Visual Coordinator charges a three-person outside jury, which changes each year, to review digital work submitted by the finalists as well as digital work submitted by current or former Fellows trying for a second-year Fellowship. Only the Visual Chair, the Visual Coordinator, and the three jurors will be present when reviewing work for the final jury. The three jurors are responsible for the final selection of the Visual Fellows. The Visual Chair and the Visual Coordinator do not enter into or interfere with the final selection of the Fellows. Throughout the whole process the applications are reviewed anonymously, by applicant ID only.

First Round: In the first round, the Visual Arts Program Committee members will jury all digital applications in two phases:

Phase 1: In late February, the Visual Committee members will be divided into sub-committees to view online submissions over a two-week time span on their individual computers. The data from the Committee members will be collected and collated by the Visual Chair and the Visual Coordinator, and the applicant pool will be to roughly 150 applications.

Phase 2: The Visual Committee will meet as a group (alternating annually between New York City and Provincetown) in early March to review the remaining online submissions and cut the applicant pool to less than 50 finalists. The Visual Coordinator and Committee chair will review the resumes of all finalists to ensure their eligibility. Jurors who determine that a very close personal relationship with an applicant presents either an actual conflict of interest or the appearance of one must recuse themselves from voting for that applicant at the final meeting. The voting tally is then weighted to compensate the applicant for the loss of a potential source of votes, so that the recusing juror neither helps nor harms the applicant at issue.

Second Round: Finalists will be invited to supplement their portfolio on Slide Room by submitting up to ten additional images or up 5 minutes of additional video by April 15th. All applicants must login to Slide Room and re-submit their application whether they have changed their portfolio or not. Members of the Visual Committee will invite an outside jury of three professional artists to travel to Provincetown in late April to review the digital submissions of the finalists, and second-year applicants. The three jurors will select seven or eight first-year Fellows with five alternates, and two or three second-year Fellows with four alternates.

Second-year Fellows: All current and former Fellows who have not already won a second-year Fellowship are eligible to apply. Current and former Fellows trying for a second-year residency are asked to notify the Visual Coordinator of their submission and must submit their initial application to Slide Room by February 1st. Second year applications will not be juried in the first pre-jury round and but will have the opportunity to adjust their application for the final jury along with first year finalists, by April 15th.

Please direct all questions to: jiglesias@fawc.org