QM-Jerome Foundation Fellowship 2027–28: $20,000 and a Debut Solo Museum Exhibition for Two Emerging New York City Artists

QM-Jerome Foundation Fellowship 2027–28: $20,000 and a Debut Solo Museum Exhibition for Two Emerging New York City Artists

There is a specific bottleneck in a visual artist’s career that money alone rarely clears: the first institutional solo show. Group exhibitions accumulate. Studio visits happen. But the leap to a solo project in a museum — with a curatorial team, a real budget, a fabrication timeline, and an audience that did not come to see your friends — usually requires an institution to decide to take the risk first. The QM-Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists exists to make that decision on a schedule, twice every two years, for artists who have not had it made for them yet.

The Queens Museum is now running the eighth iteration of the program. Two visual artists living in New York City will each receive $20,000, a year of professional development consultations with museum staff, four mentorship sessions with an established New York-based artist they help select, and a solo project exhibition at the Queens Museum in 2028. Applications close September 28, 2026 at 11:59 pm EST, and the museum states plainly that late submissions will not be accepted.

This guide is built from the Queens Museum’s official open call page and its published FAQ. It covers what the fellowship provides, the unusually precise eligibility definition the museum applies, how the jury evaluates applications, and how to prepare a proposal that reads as ready rather than aspirational.

Key Details at a Glance

What the Fellowship Actually Provides

The $20,000 is the headline, but read the museum’s description of it carefully: the award “covers the artist fee, materials, and relevant production costs for the work the fellow will create for the exhibition.” This is not an unrestricted living stipend dressed up as a fellowship. It is a production budget with your fee folded into it, and the proportion you allocate to each is a decision you should make consciously rather than discover in month nine.

The award arrives as a lump sum in two installments. That structure matters for planning. If your project front-loads fabrication costs — a large steel armature, a print run, a commissioned sound piece — you need to know when the second installment lands relative to when vendors expect payment. Ask this during the interview stage if you are shortlisted, or during an information session.

The non-cash components are where the fellowship earns its reputation. Fellows get professional development consultations with Queens Museum staff working toward the artist’s project. They get a mentor: fellows propose a list of local established artists whose practice aligns with their own, and in consultation with the QM team, one is invited to participate in four mentorship and feedback sessions over the year. That the fellow drives the shortlist is a meaningful design choice — it means the mentorship is calibrated to your practice rather than assigned from a rotating panel.

And then the exhibition. Past fellows have been direct about what this is worth. sonia louise davis described the fellowship as arriving “at a crucial moment,” noting that mounting a first institutional solo exhibition with funding was what made the milestone navigable. American Artist described gaining “an understanding of how production, labor, and research factor into a large-scale exhibition” and learning “how to interface with a large institution” — the operational literacy that no amount of studio time teaches. Kameelah Janan Rasheed pointed to something else again: space to experiment with scale, materials, and architecture that had not previously been available.

The alumni roster is a reasonable proxy for the program’s judgment. Past fellows include Meredith James, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Casey Tang (2014–15); Ronny Quevedo, Sable Elyse Smith, and Julia Weist (2016–17); Alexandria Smith and American Artist (2018–19); Asif Mian and Sydney Shen (2020–21); sonia louise davis and Emile L. Gossiaux (2022–23); Abang-guard and Umber Majeed (2024–25); and Christina Barrera and Keli Safia Maksud (2026–27).

Who Counts as “Emerging” Here

Most open calls leave “emerging” undefined and let the jury sort it out. The Queens Museum does the opposite, and the specificity is worth reading line by line before you invest time in an application — because several of these criteria disqualify artists who feel emerging by every ordinary measure.

Geography. You must reside in one of the five boroughs of New York City, and you must have lived in the city for at least one year prior to the fellowship’s start in January 2027. You must remain a city resident through the end of the fellowship period. Artists in Westchester, Long Island, or New Jersey are not eligible regardless of how embedded they are in the New York art world.

Years of practice. You need between 2 and 10 years of experience generating new artistic work outside of a degree-granting program. The museum defines generative artists as those creating new original work developed by the artist from conception to completion. Two clarifications matter here. First, time spent obtaining an optional post-graduate degree does not count toward the 2–10 year window. Second — and this is a genuinely thoughtful provision — the program does not count demonstrable breaks such as caregiving or medical leave as part of the eligible practice period. If you stepped away for three years to care for a family member, that pause does not consume your eligibility clock.

Exhibition history. You have not had a solo exhibition at a museum. You have not presented a solo show at an established commercial gallery in the United States, or in New York specifically. You may have exhibited internationally on a limited basis, but you should not have had major exhibition opportunities in the US or New York.

Awards. You have not received major grants that target mid-career and established artists. The museum names examples: the Hodder Fellowship, the Lee Krasner Award, the MacArthur Fellowship, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Ellsworth Kelly Award, the Herb Alpert Award, “or any other significant award defined as for mid-career or established artists.” Modest project grants and early-career fellowships do not disqualify you — the FAQ describes an eligible artist as having “no more than a few grants or fellowship awards.”

Employment and enrollment. You cannot be a tenured faculty member at a university or college. You cannot be currently enrolled in a degree-granting program.

What is explicitly not a factor. Age is not considered. Neither is formal training in a degree program. An artist who came to a serious practice at 45 without an MFA is on equal footing with a 28-year-old Yale graduate, provided both fall inside the 2–10 year window.

Collectives. Applications are accepted from individual artists or from artist collectives of no more than two members.

The Queens Museum Context, and Why It Should Shape Your Proposal

The FAQ states that strong applications “have an understanding of the context at QM.” That sentence is doing more work than it appears to, and it is the single most common place where otherwise excellent applications go generic.

The Queens Museum is not a neutral white cube in Chelsea. It sits in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, in one of the most linguistically and culturally diverse counties in the United States, and its programming is built around that. The museum describes community as “at the center of the QM’s work” and emphasizes collaboration with neighbors and community partners across the borough. Its audience includes park visitors, school groups, and residents who did not arrive with an art-world frame of reference.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s account of her fellowship illustrates what engaging that context can look like — she taught a multilingual, intergenerational zine-making class that let her see “the potential of an exhibition project that integrates all elements of my practice as both an artist and educator.” Asif Mian noted how his exhibition “integrated itself into the Queens community from items in the gift shop, to educational tours, and a guided sound meditation performance.”

You are not required to make a participatory or community-based project. But you should be able to articulate, specifically, why this work belongs in this building in front of this audience. A proposal that would read identically if you swapped in the name of any other institution tells the jury you have not thought about the placement.

Visit if you can. The museum is open to the public, the Panorama of the City of New York is there, and an afternoon of looking at the actual galleries will improve your proposal more than a week of reading about them.

How to Apply and the Timeline

The application is submitted through the online form linked from the official open call page. The Queens Museum offered two information sessions ahead of the deadline, on July 16 and September 9, 2026 — if the September session has not yet passed when you read this, attend it. Information sessions are where you get answers to the questions the FAQ does not cover, and where you hear how staff talk about the program in their own words.

Required materials center on work samples and a proposed project. On the question of technical drawings, the museum is explicit: floor plans, sketches, and renderings are not required. Artists are welcome to include visual materials related to the proposed project as work samples if they exist, but their absence is not a mark against you.

The timeline after submission:

The jury is composed of curatorial staff from the Queens Museum plus two guest jurors. Shortlisted candidates are invited to an in-person interview at the museum in November. The museum states it hopes to inform all applicants — not only the finalists — before the new year.

What the Jury Is Reading For

The museum names three evaluation criteria for shortlisting: the strength of the proposed project, the overall practice, and the work samples. It then describes what strong applications demonstrate: “a clear and ambitious vision, strong readiness to expand and experiment in their artistic practice, and an understanding of the context at QM.”

Unpack “readiness to expand and experiment.” The jury is not looking for a proposal to execute something you have already made three versions of. Nor are they looking for a leap so large that nothing in your portfolio suggests you could land it. The persuasive middle ground is a project that is visibly the next thing your practice has been building toward — where the work samples make the trajectory legible and the proposal names the specific new capacity the fellowship would unlock. Scale, material, duration, and site are the usual axes of expansion, and past fellows’ testimony suggests the program genuinely supports movement along them.

“Clear and ambitious” is a pairing, not a choice between two options. Ambition without clarity reads as a mood board. Clarity without ambition reads as a project you could complete without them.

Building the Application

Work samples. These carry disproportionate weight because they are the only evidence the jury has that you can actually make the thing. Sequence them deliberately: lead with your strongest and most recent work, and make sure the set as a whole shows a coherent practice rather than a survey of everything you have ever tried. Documentation quality is not a neutral variable — poorly lit installation shots make ambitious work look tentative.

The project proposal. Write it so that a curator can picture the room. What is in the gallery? What does a visitor encounter first? What is the scale, and what is it made of? If the answer to any of these is genuinely undetermined at proposal stage, say so and explain what would determine it — an honest open question reads better than a confident invention.

Your practice narrative. Connect the proposed project to the work samples explicitly. The jury should not have to reconstruct the logic themselves.

Eligibility documentation. Be accurate about your years of practice and your exhibition history. If you are relying on the caregiving or medical-leave provision to fall inside the 2–10 year window, state that clearly rather than leaving the jury to reconcile dates that appear not to add up.

Common Mistakes

Applying when you are not eligible. The most frequent waste of effort. Read the exhibition-history and years-of-practice rules against your actual CV before you begin. A solo show at an established commercial gallery in New York disqualifies you no matter how small the gallery felt.

Treating the $20,000 as a stipend. It covers artist fee, materials, and production. A proposal whose fabrication needs obviously exceed the award, with no account of how the gap gets closed, invites the jury to imagine an unfinished exhibition.

Generic institutional framing. As above — a proposal that ignores the Queens Museum specifically is competing at a disadvantage against ones that do not.

Missing the deadline. The museum states without qualification that late submissions will not be accepted. Submit at least a day early; portals fail, and September 28 at 11:59 pm EST is a hard edge.

Under-preparing for the interview. If you are shortlisted, you will be in the building in November talking to curators and two guest jurors. Arrive able to discuss the project’s practical requirements — timeline, fabrication, installation needs — not only its concept.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can two artists apply together? Yes. Collectives of no more than two members are accepted.

Does my MFA count toward the 2–10 years? No. Time spent obtaining an optional post-graduate degree is excluded from the window, as is time in any degree-granting program.

I took two years off for caregiving. Does that count against me? No. The program explicitly does not count demonstrable breaks such as caregiving or medical leave as part of the 2–10 year period.

I have received a couple of small project grants. Am I still eligible? Yes. The FAQ describes an eligible emerging artist as having “no more than a few grants or fellowship awards.” The disqualifying awards are major ones aimed at mid-career and established artists.

Do I need renderings of my proposed installation? No. They are optional work samples, not a requirement.

When will I hear back if I am not shortlisted? The museum states it hopes to inform all applicants before the end of the year.

Is there an application fee? The official open call page does not list one. This is not confirmed either way on the page; check the application form before assuming.

Do I have to stay in New York City for the whole fellowship? Yes. Applicants should reside in the five boroughs until the end of the fellowship period.

Official Links and Contacts

• Open call and FAQ: queensmuseum.org — Open Call: 2027–28 QM-Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists
• Application form: linked directly from the open call page
• Accessibility and accommodation requests: [email protected], or (718) 592-9700 ext. 145. The Queens Museum states it is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for physical or cognitive needs, including for any part of the application process.
• Funder: the fellowship is supported by a grant from the Jerome Foundation

If you are eligible, the calculus here is straightforward. Two awards, a one-year term, and a debut museum solo show is a rare combination at this career stage, and the field of applicants who genuinely satisfy the 2–10 year window while living in the five boroughs is narrower than the prestige of the program suggests. The work is in the proposal: make the room visible, make the expansion credible, and make clear why the exhibition belongs in Flushing Meadows Corona Park rather than anywhere else.