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The Ox-Bow Summer Fellowship is inviting emerging visual artists to apply for a fully-funded, summer-long residency that offers studio time, community-building, professional development, and exhibition opportunities.
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Get matched →The Ox-Bow Summer Fellowship is a fully-funded, summer-long residency for emerging visual artists. It offers studio time, community-building, professional development, and exhibition opportunities. Fellows receive dedicated studio space, room and board, three meals daily, a weekly stipend, and travel reimbursement. Fellows contribute to Ox-Bow’s daily operations, gaining experience within an artist-run nonprofit. For 2027, the Fellowship expands to 18 artists and welcomes applicants with comparable professional experience outside academic programs. Fellows will spend twelve weeks to slow down and deepen their practice within a creative community, playing a central role in how the campus operates—contributing time and skills to culinary studio, grounds, and administrative tasks. A rotating group of students, visiting artists, and faculty bring fresh perspectives and conversations every week. After leaving campus, alumni continue discovering how collaborators, mentors, and friends influence their practices long after summer ends, becoming part of a larger lineage of artists who have gathered on this historic campus.
The Fellowship will expand to welcome more artists and new pathways into the Ox-Bow experience. The program will grow to 18 fellows and broaden eligibility beyond traditional academic backgrounds to include artists with equivalent professional experience. New opportunities for professional development, exhibitions, and campus stewardship will reflect Ox-Bow’s longstanding tradition: fostering a community where artists at all levels make, learn, and grow together.
Timed for the moment before you leave Ox-Bow, the week-long professional practice intensive is a concentrated gathering of critics, curators, gallerists, arts administrators, and entrepreneurs designed to prepare and enhance your career as an artist.
In the year following the fellowship, fellows are invited to exhibit work at Ox-Bow's Chicago gallery and office space located in the Chicago Avenue gallery district, or at partner galleries in Chicago, Detroit, and beyond. Our exhibition programs extend the Ox-Bow community beyond campus, placing fellows' work in conversation with the broader contemporary art world.
Every listing links to the organizer's official page. Always confirm deadlines, fees, and entry rules there before you apply.
Each cohort participates in a campus beautification week alongside staff, faculty, and alumni, joining a century of artists who have shaped this campus. This shared, hands-on contribution to the physical grounds of Ox-Bow’s campus offers skill-building, stewardship, and the chance to leave a mark on an historic artist-built campus for the next group of artists to inherit.
The Fellowship is open to senior BFA students, MFA students, postgraduates, and artists with comparable professional experience. We seek artists committed to their practice, prepared for intensive studio work, and eager to join a collaborative creative community. We evaluate applications based on the strength of your practice and your readiness for this unique experience. After successfully completing one Fellowship summer, alumni may reapply.
Applicants are evaluated based on the strength of their portfolio, their readiness for the program, and an interview with Ox-Bow leadership.
Fellows contribute 20 hours per week to Ox-Bow's operations—working in the kitchen, studios, grounds, archives, administration, and across communications and events.