Social Practice CUNY Sets February 2027 Sunset After Five Years of Artist-Led Funding
Social Practice CUNY, the artist-run fellowship initiative co-directed by Chloë Bass and Greg Sholette, will end in February 2027, with its 2025–26 cohort serving as the final round of support. Based at the CUNY Graduate Center, the program reached graduate students and faculty across all 25 campuses of the City University of New York, building a rare network for artists and scholars working in socially engaged practice.
The decision to close, Bass and Sholette said, followed a deliberate process shaped in part by changes in their own careers. Bass stepped away from a full-time teaching position at Queens College at the end of the 2024–25 academic year to focus on her art practice, while Sholette retired from teaching there. The two described the initiative as something that had taken on the shape of an institution without ever ceasing to be an artist-run project.
Launched in 2021 with a $530,000, three-year grant from the Mellon Foundation, Social Practice CUNY later received an additional $600,000 over two years in September 2023. Over five years, it awarded $535,000 in direct support to 129 fellows, who were free to use the money for their own work. The program also organized workshops under the title “How to Survive as an Artist” and produced the podcast “Part of the Practice.”
Its reach extended well beyond a single department or discipline. Fellows came from social work, nursing and public health, geography, architecture, performance studies, and art, reflecting the project’s central argument: that socially engaged practice is often shaped outside the narrow structures of the classroom. Bass and Sholette had first developed that thinking through Social Practice Queens, a Queens College partnership with the Queens Museum, and through their book, “Art as Social Action: An Introduction to the Principles and Practices of Teaching Social Practice Art.”
For Bass and Sholette, the program’s significance lies not only in the grants it distributed, but in the community it made possible. In a university system as large as CUNY, Social Practice CUNY offered a model for how interdisciplinary work can move across campuses, departments, and professional identities without losing its political and artistic urgency.
