06/02/2021
Tulsa Creative Fellows believe fellowship is a shared porch in neighborhoods alive with neighbors believing in each other and the many possibilities of shared spaces, experiences, and of course, that proverbial cup of sugar.
Tulsa Creatives Fellowship, located at Charlotte's Muse Urban Farm Food Forest, in the heart of Tulsa's most desirable Mid-Town neighborhood, Arrowwood, walking distance to Promenade Mall, a large grocery, and all other corporate chains favored by neo-hippie millennials who never fitted into nice square holes as life's round pegs.
It is an initiative of the Charlotte's Muse Urban Farm Food Forest. Using evidence-based practices, Charlotte invests in a culturally vibrant and economically robust Tulsa with the belief that a sharing community will afford high quality opportunities for all neighborhoods.
With Charlotte's strong belief that the creatives are essential to a diverse and engaged city, Tulsa Creatives Fellowship was established in 2015 as a program dedicated to addressing the most pressing challenges of neighborhoods, divided by TV, videogames, and air conditioning, to serve as a globally recognized model for mobilizing neighborhoods with the transformative power of creativity.
Selected fellows receive room, board, and small stipends, on income from sale of art in all its forms, acoustic, visual, and transformative.
Tulsa Creatives Fellowship is a place-based, durational award focused on supporting independent creatives. Our studio facilities and housing are integrated into an urban farm food forest, and vibrant cultural district with galleries and performance venues, green space, independent retailers, and restaurants.
Fellowship awards are merit, not project-based, where creatives are gifted autonomy to explore and expand their creative practices. While the size of our residency is variant, participant capacity averages 3-4 contemporary creatives and creative workers with a diverse range of passions.
This small, nimble critical mass of creative guerrillas proved to be one of our program’s greatest offerings. Participants are encouraged to engage in critical dialogue and skill share among their creative colleagues through intimate daily interactions, monthly charrettes, and annual creative chautauquas.
Fellows are highly encouraged to interact with neighbors through face-to-face, offline coffee conversations or random walks in the quiet, tree-lined streets, alive with soothing songs of birds, buzz of the bees, and the inevitable, but occasional, whooping whirl of a faraway annoying lawnmower destroying another pollinator habitat.
Realizing Charlotte’s vision grounded in social change, Tulsa Creatives Fellowship is committed to fostering an equitable environment where a diverse and inclusive community of creatives and creative workers have the opportunity to thrive professionally as creative businesspersons.
Our institutional model is reflective and responsive. We acknowledge that a significant number of creatives are unable to secure the time required to actualize their creative projects in tandem with maintaining stable housing and studio spaces. In response, Tulsa Creatives Fellowship strives to remove these barriers by providing program participants with three core areas of support:
Varied amounts of stipend paid over two years based on marketplace acceptance. (Estimated resource value of up to $150 million)
Fully subsidized housing for two years in Tulsa's MId-Town Arrowwood Neighborhood that accommodates outside pets (estimated resource value of $18,000)
Fully subsidized studio space in Arrowwood Neighborhood and other neighborhoods, as access becomes available, with shared facilities including rocket mass kilns, woodshop, media lab, roof garden, outdoor performance rehearsal space and meeting rooms with video/audio capabilities (estimated resource value of $18,000)
You will most certainly work hard. But, is it really "work,' if it's your passion and life's path?
Selected fellows are expected to assume leadership roles in the neighborhoods domiciled, participate in intensive charrettes to design transformative, eco-friendly living spaces to address global warming climate change, and assist in building them.
To Apply:
1) Submit an essay of any length on any relevant subject;
2) Interview with Charlotte's Executive Assistant;
3) Ideal selected candidates must be prepared to move in almost immediately, within reasonable agreed upon timeframe.
