Artist Residencies at Folkist Space
Applications open until October 20th for funded residencies in 2025!
A note for the 2025 season:
After five years of hosting artist residents, we’re rebranding with clearer language for what we’ve been doing all along— creating a space to support folk artists.
Please, whatever you do, don’t try to look up a definition of “folk arts!” You’ll find a lot of academic word salad that uses terms like “simple people” and “primitive technique.” As a life-long practitioner of folk traditions whose masters work with rigor, nuance, and great technical skill, those definitions truly feel like they were written by outsiders who missed the whole-ass point.
At Folkist Space, our definition of folk art is creative work with its roots in, or branches into, the everyday lives of regular working people. The folk art we love spans genres, mediums, and cultures, but is always rooted in the urgent aliveness of folks who are not separate from the world but fully immersed in it. These artists— many of whom fit a serious art practice around bill-paying, caregiving, and community commitments— are finding a way to feel something that needs to be felt, share something that needs to be shared, and move people who need to be moved.
The mission of the Folkist Space Residency is to support visionary creators whose work does what folk art does best: help us to feel our feelings, inhabit our bodies, and move a little differently through the world.
From textile arts to creative non-fiction, traditional music and dance, documentary photography, theatre arts, and more, we're looking for all kinds of creative folks whose locus of creation is primarily centered outside traditional academic and institutional structures of support. Find more weedsy details about the program and application process in our FAQs, or go straight to the application page here.
About the residency
Our artist residency programs began as a response to our own experiences as working artists with bill-paying jobs. Time, solitude, and institutional support can make an enormous difference when you are developing your voice and your work— but that kind of space is often out of reach for creatives with financial constraints and/or caregiving responsibilities.
We knew that the world was full of talented, serious artists who could not attend programs that required long stays or a large financial commitment, and these short, funded residencies were designed with those artists in mind.
We offer a handful of week-long funded residencies to emerging artists each year in partnership with the Kirkland Art Center. And we’re proud to offer a fourth residency week this year specifically for musicians in memory of two beloved volunteers who supported the Kirkland Art Center’s live music program for many years.
Now in Partnership with the Kirkland Art Center
We’re happy to announce that we’re partnering with our neighbors at the Kirkland Art Center for another year! Our partnership with the KAC (only 4 doors down from The Garret) means that each selected artist resident will receive an unrestricted $500 stipend, and studio space at the Art Center for the week of their stay.