Artist Fellowships & Residencies

Over the course of three weeks, Fellows live and work onsite to develop an independent creative project that thoughtfully engages and mentors local residents. This work is site-responsive, with an on-site proposal process guided by our staff and informed by the Fellow’s experiences listening and learning from Cuyama Valley communities. 

In the current iteration, our fellowships are focused on exploring one or more of the seven community priorities from the Cuyama Valley Community Action Plan. We call the participating artists “Cuyama Action Fellows.” In a prior iteration, we hosted “Desert Fellows.” Profiles of that work can be found on our website here.

Ideal Cuyama Action Fellow candidates are self-directed, community-centered artists with interest or experience working in rural places. You work across or between mediums, using creative practice to reflect, respond, imagine, critique—or something else entirely. You engage with history, grapple with the present, or address the future. You enter new communities with sensitivity and create work that builds upon values of equity, inclusion, and co-creation. The objectives are:

1. To invite exchange and collaboration between the Fellow, Cuyama Valley residents, and Blue Sky Center.

2. To further arts enrichment and access within the Cuyama Valley.

3. To expand the field of socially-engaged arts to include rural places.

4. To creatively build the capacity of Blue Sky Center as an organization and community resource.

5. To highlight one or more community priorities identified in the Community Action Plan through education and advocacy. 

6. Design works reflecting architecture, communications and graphic design, fashion design, historic preservation, industrial and product design, interior design, landscape architecture, inclusive design, rural design, social impact design, and urban design.

For the current round of CUYAMA Action Fellows:

Application opens: Wednesday, November 15th, 2023

• Application closes: 11:59 PM Pacific, Sunday, December 31st, 2023

• Interviews: January 8th-26th, 2024

• Notifications by: mid-February 2024

We aim to make our application and selection processes as accessible and transparent as possible. As such, our application is free and open to anyone to apply, consisting of short-answer questions and a work samples document. Our selections team is made up of 7-12 panelists that include Cuyama Valley community members, alumni visiting artists, alumni staff, and the Blue Sky Center Creative Community Engagement project team.

Please complete our Google Form application, which includes the following short-answer prompts. Please keep each response to 1,000 characters (about 200 words) or less.

• Please introduce yourself. (Who are you? What should we know about you? What experiences do you bring that might inform your residency?)

• Describe your creative practice. (What kind of work do you make? Why do you make it? How has your practice evolved and in what direction do you hope to take your work in the future?)

• Provide a statement of intent. (Why do you want to do this residency? Why now? Why Blue Sky Center and/or the Cuyama Valley?)

• Indicate your aligned interests. (Which of the seven community priorities are you interested in addressing in your project? Why are you interested in these priorities? How is your skill set relevant to the priorities you chose?)

• Explain your approach to community co-creation. (Provide examples of your social practice and strategies of creative community engagement.)

• Describe your lived rural experience/appreciation and how it will inform your time in the Cuyama Valley. (Why do you want to spend three weeks in a rural place? Why might this rural experience be compelling/challenging/exciting in relation to your life/practice?)

• Examples of past work. Upload a PDF not exceeding 10 MB and five (5) letter-sized (8-1⁄2” x 11”) pages. The PDF should highlight relevant work. Include brief captions or explanations as needed. This document should highlight 4-6 projects in whatever form your work is best represented (writing samples, images, video/stills, performance ephemera, descriptions, etc.). If your work lives online, you may include direct links to specific pages/projects, NOT to portfolios of multiple works. If submitting video examples, include direct links with an explanation of the work. Please limit videos to five (5) minutes in total length.

Thinking about applying? Direct questions to our residency coordinator.