We believe that art doesn’t just reflect the world - it remakes it. 🌍 And we’re thrilled to announce three extraordinary artists joining Culture Push as Associated Artists, each bringing bold visions that challenge, heal, and transform. 💫
Culture Push Associated Artists receive support for mid-process and established projects that are aligned with the mission and experimental vision of Culture Push. Associated Artists are individuals and projects that have established themselves within New York City, but can still benefit from collaboration with and assistance from our organization. Unlike the seedling-stage ideas of our Fellowship for Utopian Practice, our Associated Artists and their projects have already run through their first logistical stages and idea-testing, and are ready to be bolstered through fiscal, institutional, and creative support.
These artists are doing the work: weaving community through textiles 🧵, re-imagining care as creative currency 💝, and exposing environmental injustice through film 🎬.
Their projects have moved beyond the idea stage and are ready to bloom 🌱 with the kind of support that our Associated Artists program offers.
At Culture Push, we’re honored to walk alongside them as they push boundaries! 🚀
Haileigh Nelson
Haileigh Nelson (They|Them) operates from the conviction that social change is not found in policy alone, but in the rhythmic act of mending - a mindful, purposeful weaving of community, creativity, and embodiment. Their artistic practice sits at this sacred intersection where personal and social transformation meet, rooted in the belief that the body is the most powerful creative source for realizing collective liberation. As a transgressive artist, facilitator, and seeker, Haileigh moves through the world dedicated to the idea that creativity is a profound pathway to healing and justice, blooming most fully when we are connected to our bodies and to one another.
They recognize that the struggle to reclaim imaginative capacities is not a personal failure, but a symptom of systemic oppression—a learned behavior of survival that can only be unlearned through a purposeful, expansive engagement with new ways of being. Consequently, Haileigh facilitates creative environments as a playground for collective liberation. By centering Black, Brown, and QTLGTSI+ voices, they invite a movement beyond lives defined by pathology toward a more holistic sense of well-being, where equitable futures can be both imagined and embodied.
In their home of Harlem - a community of cultural radiance, resistance, and ancestral wisdom - Haileigh uses fashion and textiles as a vital language for liberation. As a Culture Push Associated Artist, they continue to ask: “If healing is ‘how much of you can be here at once,’ what do we need to heal?”. Their work seeks to blur the lines between art, politics, and daily life, ensuring that the wisdom carried within the community is not only preserved but transformed into legacy in motion. Ultimately, Haileigh’s practice is a continuous exploration of how creativity, embodiment, and community can ignite deep healing, environmental reverence, and the transformative power of seeing and relating to one another differently.
Alisa Yang
alisa yang (she/they) is an antidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and emerging disability advocate with a research based practice exploring art making as radical acts of care. Centering the body as a living archive of socio-geopolitical conditionings, they works across video, installation, and situational specific projects in orienting oneself towards social change.
In response to the 2027 Medicaid work requirements, I am prototyping a creative solution rooted in a reciprocal care economy for those at risk of losing benefits. Centering the ME/CFS and Long Covid community through an experimental performance framework, I am developing artistic strategies that leverage art’s capacity to serve as a currency for care, offering a replicable model for survival and mutual support.
Tyrel Hunt
Tyrel Hunt is a novelist, filmmaker, and Marketing Director from Queens, New York. After graduating as a Division One student-athlete, he has written, edited, and directed several award-winning films including his most recent feature “The Sound of Southside” (Based on his novel of the same name). Tyrel works as the Director of Marketing and Communications at Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning. He is the Co-founder and CEO of Gritty Vibes Studios, a video production company that has worked with Nike, GQ, Esquire, JFK Airport, NY Philharmonic, Resorts World NYC, and much more. As a filmmaker, Tyrel’s films have screened in theaters across the country and earned dozens of fellowships, grants and awards. As a novelist, Tyrel’s book “The Sound of Southside” is currently taught at Baruch College’s Black and Latino Studies Department.
His Project “People vs Power: Beneath the Grid” is a short documentary film that investigates the various battery farms being built across Southeast Queens. By utilizing key interviews, and cinematic footage, the film will examine the thread between this proposed project, and others that have caused harm in black and brown communities.
Gil Lopez
As an environmental educator and activist, gil lopez creates earth-based installations and works within land-based movements to produce socially engaged art and bioremediation outcomes. Working with multiple stakeholders, including more-than-human entities, gil creates opportunities to engage with and activate space and time. By promoting collaborations between people, plants, soil and other life, gil’s work defines participation in ways that both challenge and broaden common (mis)understandings of society, ecosystems and our place within them. There is a sense of hopeful joy which grows out of participation in gil’s happenings and activations.
Project: “MettaOrganisms in Firmament” - Us humans, as superorganisms, have a complex relationship with our own bodies and with the ecosystems we inhabit and those our lifestyles affect at a distance. MettaOrganisms in Firmament will bring people together to collect and work with microorganisms in nature while learning about and living soil food web. In parallel, we will also make probiotic foods and beverages which improve our own microbiomes. This work positions human existence as mediators between our interior and exterior worlds while honoring the sacred and biological interdependence of life at the micro and macro levels. Through this awareness we also cultivate metta, or loving-kindness towards oneself and all living beings.
♾️ From the Culture Push Community
Come experience Migration Stories with Culture Push Black Utopian Fellowship Director Denae Howard aka Artschoolscammer.
In honor of Black History Month, Migration Stories celebrates pieces that explore personal, ancestral, and generational experiences of migration across borders, neighborhoods, and time.
Exhibition dates: February 12 - 21
Location: Fulton Art Fair Gallery
Your invite to a tactile description workshop by Culture Push Access Doula & Disability Culture Activist moira williams.
Image Description: A photo of textures upon textures. A long curved and lined cream colored oyster shell. Its top edge is tattered and broken in a wavy straight line. The oyster shell holds a purple black flat and rounded piece of shell. Next to the flat shell is a reddish brown oblong and tiny orb clustered seed pod. The sealed orbs are slightly fuzz covered. Some orbs are bursted open and have sharp edges. Nestled next to the seed pod but on top of the flat shell is another oyster shell. It’s smaller, more rounded with dark speckles and smudges. The top most rounded part of the shell is dotted with crusty holes. In its pointy bottom are 3 small pieces of lined, tattered and sea smoothed, broken black purple clam shells. On top of them is a small, medium blue, broken rounded bird egg shell. A brown streaked and robust oblong shaped acorn seed rests its rounded top on its textured browns and circular cupped seed top. The layered shells rest in a long messy haired spiky edged oblong piece of hot pink fake fur. Peaking out from under the fur’s fluffy spikes on the left is a narrow strip of fabric. It is covered with shining greens in an undulating and glimmering tiny diamond shaped pattern. Gathered folds of shimmering dark dark green stiff fabric sparkle at the top left. On the right and under the spiky fur is a grainy dark brown texture that sometimes turns into lines on a warm light brown. This is moira’s alter.
description
A touch score workshop using our high-fi analog haptics: touch.
Tactile experiences are some of the most deeply instinctive ways we communicate, bear witness, make ceremony, move and connect with the world and each other. We are not separate from the material world or the land. How do we invoke words to express lived experiences like touch, and re-ignite or unfold it into another form? During our time together we will create a touch score with a beloved or sacred object by playing with virtual backgrounds to invoke our tactile memories and ritual practices.
1 touch score by moira as a reference for you, is after the virtual background and their IDs
when + where
join us via zoom in any way your bodymind spirit desires. please know there are no expectations to produce anything. hanging with us is welcome!
RestFest is an artist-run film and video art festival and online gathering space created by and for Disabled, Deaf, Chronically ill, Neurodivergent, and/or Mad communities.
moira williams (they/them) is a transdisciplinary disabled artist, curator, cultural activist, and dreamer of Lenape, Kickapoo, Wyandot, and Sämi descent. Their ongoing co-creativity with land, water and people unsettles ableist and ecological boundaries between bodies by imagining “ecological intimacy” as an expansion of Mia Mingus’s “access intimacy.”
what to bring
Please bring 1 or 2 beloved and/or sacred objects you’d like to create a touch score for and with. This can be an altar, a stim object, anything that you have a ritual and/or comforting relationship with.
flow + format
Relaxed open meeting format in zoom. You are welcome to participate in any way your bodymind spirit desires, speaking out loud, using the chat, keeping your video on or off as you like, come and go as you need, move, rest, eat, or simply co-creating, hanging, and sharing crip space.
Please know that we will be honoring and celebrating our crip bodymind spirits, tactile expressions, and grace for one another.
We welcome your support requests and are happy to slow down, repeat, and stop.
Welcomingings, greetings and getting cozy.
Upload virtual backgrounds and turn on the green screen.
Using the green screen feature in zoom we will play with our virtual backgrounds to invoke our tactical memories and expressions.
Share what tactile memories, sensory expressions, words came up.
Read moira’s touch score together “one clam shell with many greeting a + feeling with” (Located in this info offering. Below virtual background images and ids).
Writing, drawing, and sharing.
Long slow goodbye.
🧡 From Friends of Culture Push
Open Call: MENA Theater Makers Fund
Sarah Dahnke (Fellow 2015 and current General Manager at the MENA Theater Makers Alliance) has shared this wonderful opportunity!
MENATMA just launched the MENA Theater Makers Fund, a new national grant for MENA cultural producers in the United States.
This program is designed for theater organizations including artist ensembles that can show a three-year track record of programming. Grants are unrestricted general operating funds (not project-specific). Through an open application process, MENATMA will distribute $800,000 total, awarding $30,000–$45,000 to organizations across the U.S. Awardees will also have access to additional funds to redistribute directly to artists in their communities.
Full details, including eligibility requirements and the grant timeline, are available on MENATMA’s website. The grant does require folks to either be a 501(c)3 or be fiscally sponsored, but we are defining theater in expansive terms and hope to bring new creators into our community.
Session provides artists a 1200sf workspace in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn and 6-10 weeks to develop a new inquiry-based project meant to push the boundaries of their practice. They will receive an artist honorarium, planning meeting fees, project expenses, technical support, and mentorship collectively valued at approximately $22,500-$25,000. Throughout the session, we will facilitate public interactions with the Recess community, as well as connections among intentional communities as identified by each artist. Our hope is that these engagements provide an opportunity for mutually beneficial exchanges that not only refine the artists’ thinking, but that challenge dominant social narratives and activate new forms of artmaking.
Based on the success of our current experimental Session cycle, we will once again host a biannual open call. In addition to the 5 Session artists selected for the 2026-27 season, we will also maintain relationships with a small cohort of applicants to further develop their proposals toward the 2027-28 season. We will also leave flexibility in the schedule for re-engaging Session alumni and/or for hosting projects with collaborating organizations advancing racial and economic justice.
The In Practice 2027 Open Call for Artist Proposals is now accepting submissions.
The proposal deadline is Feb 26, 2026 at 11:59pm EST. Apply on Submittable. All artists will be notified of their submission status via email by May 2026. Up to seven artists will be selected to participate in the program between Jan and Dec 2027.
We invite artists who have not yet had an institutional solo exhibition in New York City to submit proposals for solo exhibitions in designated gallery spaces at SculptureCenter. Artists are also invited to propose off-site projects, publishing initiatives, performances, and nontraditional formats, which will be considered based on feasibility. Up to seven artists will be selected to participate in the program from Jan to Dec 2027. Each exhibition will be on view for approximately four to six weeks.
Proposals must reflect new work to be realized in 2027.
Please prepare to submit a preliminary itemized production budget up to $6,000. Further details are available within the Submittable application form. Participating artists will receive a separate honorarium of $1,000. You do not need to include an honorarium in your production budget.
Image requirements: Please ensure that your image selection includes past and/or related work as well as proposal images, renderings, or sketches.
Open Call for 2026 Summer Season - Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR).
Ivy Baldwin, performance still from Emergency Grants-supported Quarry, at MANITOGA/The Russel Wright Design Center in Garrison, NY, 2019. Photo by Maria Baranova.
Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR), the first residency in the United States exclusively for artists identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, non-binary, intersex, two-spirit or queer, annually accepts applications for its prestigious and internationally recognized summer program. Now in its 15th season in the secluded beach community of Cherry Grove, NY, an historic LGBTQ settlement of Fire Island, emerging artists will share a live/work space for a four-week program marked by intimate studio visits with, and public lectures by, renowned leaders in contemporary art, scholarship, activism and curation.
OPEN CALL FOR 2026 SUMMER SEASON JANUARY 15, 2026.
