PROGRAMMING HIGHLIGHTS
Our 2025 programming continued to thrive with the energy of our mission + vision. As always, racial justice permeated our work.
Additionally, we uplifted climate resilience and public art through our third Change Lab Research Fellow’s policy recommendations, engaged a fourth Change Lab Research Fellow to dive into Civic Engagement and Public Art, and we explored how artists are building civic knowledge, strengthening social cohesion, and creating more culturally responsive institutions through our eighth FORWARD publication.
We also continued to strengthen local public art practices and capacity nationwide. Our experienced curriculum development team led trainings in three states for creatives and public art administrators.
ARTIST GRANT PROGRAM
2025 Forecast Grant Recipients
Public artists help us connect with each other and understand our shared world. Our grant program gives public artists time and space to develop research and locally connected projects. We work to provide access to our grant applications for a diverse group of artists, who are working in all career stages and ranges of public art practices and media. We place particular emphasis on supporting and amplifying the artistic work of BIPOC and Native artists, LGBTQIA+ artists, artists who have experienced gender-based oppression, immigrant artists, artists from rural communities, and artists with disabilities. These have long been the only public art grants in the country that fund self-initiated artist projects rather than asking artists to answer a call.
This year’s grant recipients are developing creative skills and planning projects to uplift their communities, transform and restore public spaces, research eco-friendly materials, hold workshops, support representation, promote cultural pride, focus on youth, foster a sense of belonging, serve women seeking safe spaces, engage with students, teachers, residents, business owners, Jewish community members, Black gender-marginalized artists, and more, through creative methods including storytelling, playwriting, music production, stencils, mosaic, illustration, light and sound installations, weaving, sculpture, street art, and murals.
Artist Grantees
- Mid-Career Project Grantees ($10,000 each): Roger Cummings; Luis Fitch; Carla Hall; Witt Siasoco; Copla by Claudia Valentino
- Early-Career Project Grantees ($8,000 each): M. Jamison; Rebekkah Anderson
- Mid-Career Professional Development Grantees ($5,000 each): Cecilia Cornejo Sotelo; Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay
- Early-Career Research + Development Grantees ($2,500 each): Z Kaplan; Michael Legan; Nancy Ariza; Aimee Kuiper
Image: (Row 1, L-R) Roger Cummings; Luis Fitch; Carla Hall; Witt Siasoco (photo: Matt Mead); Claudia Valentino. (Row 2) Cecilia Cornejo Sotelo; Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay; M Jamison; Rebekkah Anderson. (Row 3) Z Kaplan; Michael Legan; Nancy Ariza; Aimee Kuiper (photo: CocoaRae).
This activity is made possible thanks to generous funding from Jerome Foundation (early-career grants) and the McKnight Foundation (mid-career grants).
FEATURED 2025 GRANT PROJECTS
Large-Scale Public Artwork at N. Minneapolis Skatepark
Community-based artist Witt Siasoco created Batad, a concrete and stainless steel tiled sculpture at the Phillips Foundation in North Minneapolis. The sculpture is Siasoco’s first large-scale permanent public artwork in the Twin Cities.
“Being awarded the Forecast Mid-Career grant provided me with the resources to create a wholly new work, increased visibility as an artist, and pushed my artistic practice into new media.”
— Witt Siasoco,
Forecast 2025 Mid-Career Project Grantee
Being The Change Through Art
A mosaic tile installation reviving a worn area of the sidewalk on the main street (Lake Street) within the City of Chisholm, bringing beauty out of brokenness with restoring a small portion of our town’s public space through mosaic design and concrete. Rebekkah Anderson's restorative art focused on being the change within your community rather than the complaint that something is wrong.
Weaving and Stitching As Acts of Repair
To deepen her commitment to a public art that is community-driven, with Forecast grant support Cecilia Cornejo Sotelo traveled to Chile, her home country, to join embroidery workshops and to meet with various textile artists including Memorarte, a women-led collective that creates embroidered pieces to promote and defend the rights of humans and nature. Funding also allowed Cecilia to connect with weavers in the island of Chiloé as part of an artist residency at the Chiloé Museum of Modern Art in southern Chile.
Grantee Artist Talks
In two artist talks, seven previous (2024) grantees shared their grant experiences.
February 6, 2025 With Hibaaq Ibrahim (Early-Career Project grantee), Thomasina Top Bear (Mid-Career Project grantee), and Tara Fahey (Mid-Career Project grantee).
Forecast consulting partner Cándida González moderated this event.
February 11, 2025 With Tahiel Jimenez Medina (Mid-Career Project grantee), Liping Vong (Early-Career Research & Development grantee), M. Jamison and Yonci Jameson (Early-Career Research & Development grantee team).
Jen Krava, Forecast Director of Learning, Grants & Research, moderated this event.
CHANGE LAB
LEE NAH
Civic Engagement and Public Art Research Fellow
Our Change Lab Research Fellowships aim to produce new research and policy suggestions to advance justice, health and human dignity in the field of public art.
A community-engaged scholar and artist from Chicago, Lee Nah graduated from Kenyon College, where she majored in Studio Art, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and Psychology. As an Obama-Chesky Voyager, she explored how arts and cultural engagement foster social cohesion in communities of color, examining feminist archives and community-based cultural spaces. She was also a fellow with Healing Arts Chicago, a pilot program that placed artists in community mental health clinics across the city.
Lee Nah is committed to studying how the arts cultivate cultural connections and holistic well-being in Chicago through feminist and queer of color critique and abolition feminism.
“I am thrilled to be joining the Change Lab as the Civic Engagement Research Fellow,” Lee says. “Through this fellowship, I will explore how public art is being used to renew civic life in marginalized communities, drawing on local, regional, and national examples of how Black, Brown, and Indigenous artists have challenged extractive development and reclaimed public space for justice.”
“I am thrilled to be joining the Change Lab as the Civic Engagement Research Fellow. Through this fellowship, I will explore how public art is being used to renew civic life in marginalized communities, drawing on local, regional, and national examples of how Black, Brown, and Indigenous artists have challenged extractive development and reclaimed public space for justice.”
—Lee Nah, Change Lab Research Fellow on Civic Engagement and Public Art
PAULA CASTILLO
Climate Resilience and Public Art Research Fellow
In July, our Research Fellow Paula Castillo held a talk about the findings in her report (which was published in late 2024). She shared insights and recommendations for how to continue moving forward public art projects that address climate change. She was joined by Sherri Brueggemann, recently retired Public Art Urban Enhancement Program Manager for the City of Albuquerque, Cultural Services Department.
Hear from Paula about her report to learn her specific recommendations for (1) Public Art Organizations, (2) Urban Planners, (3) City, county, state, and federal jurisdictions, (4) Arts Non-profit organizations, and (5) Federal Governmental Agencies (like FEMA, EPA and others).
A Latina artist based in Belén, New Mexico, Paula Castillo holds an MFA from the University of New Mexico; she creates performative and sculptural installations inspired by human geography and environmental research. Her recent public-facing work includes Reverse the Curse, a transformative ritual-based participatory performance that critically examines the impact of mechanical applications on the Rio Grande River.
As a Research Fellow, Castillo’s work is poised to make a significant impact. She explored how our communities can foster more robust collaborations among public art agencies, public artists who are BIPOC and/or low-income and/or rural, and environmental justice researchers and activists. Her research and recommendations have the potential to provide national public art agencies with invaluable templates, tools, and inspiration.
Castillo’s Change Lab research aims to pave the way for a climate-resilient future.
Objectives
Paula identifies these based on the Federal Government's National Climate Resilience Framework. These objectives are adapted with a focus on public art to provide a template for which to view the intersection of climate resilience and public-facing art expressions, especially in communities in need:
- Embed climate resilience into public art via urban planning objectives.
- Use public art to increase resilience of the built environment to both acute climate shocks and chronic stressors.
- Mobilize capital, investment, and innovation to leverage public art to advance climate resiliency at scale.
- Employ public-facing artistic expressions to equip communities with information and resources needed to assess their climate risks and develop the climate resilience solutions most appropriate for them.
- Employ public-facing art expressions to help inspire communities to sustainably manage lands and waters to enhance resilience while providing numerous other benefits.
- Employ public-facing art expressions to help communities become not only more resilient, but also more safe, healthy, equitable, and economically strong.
FORWARD
FORWARD Issue 8: Civic Health
The eighth issue in our FORWARD series spotlights civic health and engagement work on civic knowledge, relationships, and transformation.
The publication is guest-edited by Richard Young, the Founder and Executive Director at CivicLex, a nonprofit in Lexington, Kentucky dedicated to strengthening civic health at the local level. As Richard shares in his introduction, the work in these pages reminds us that democracy isn’t actually about institutions, policies, or elections. It’s about the everyday, and the possibilities that bind us together.
Readers will also find a featured interview from Reanne Estrada and Mike Blockstein of Public Matters, a creative studio for civic engagement. The two of them joyfully practice good mischief to humanize civic systems, using art as a lever to center community and inspire radical change.
Our guest curator, Forecast’s Director of Planning + Engagement Ebony Dumas, curated Public Art Now through the lens of creating with community. Including, for example, a music-making tree sculpture that also serves as a community gathering space, and an artist using AI to create Afrofuturist landscapes that reenvision public spaces to center Black people, Black culture, and Black aesthetics.
The issue also holds a Toolkit filled with resources for working creatively in civic health and engagement, along with our popular Dream Job description, which, for this issue, is presented as a Dream Ordinance. Chicago-based cultural strategist Amanda Carlson offers this measure, and asks us to think about what percentage of a local community’s budget should be dedicated to artist-led work, and how that money should flow.
Browse the publication for inspiration and practical ideas to embrace arts & culture as the civic infrastructure that it is.
FORWARD #8 TEAM
Theresa Sweetland (Publisher); Richard Young (Guest Editor) Jen Dolen (Project Manager); Mallory Rukhsana Nezam (Curator of Partnerships + Programming); Reanne Estrada and Mike Blockstein (Featured Interview); Ebony Dumas (Guest Curator); Jon Spayde (Senior Editor); Loma Huh (Copy Editor); Ben Stanley (Contributing Writer); Emme Sugnet (Editorial Assistant); Amanda Carlson (Contributor); Jen Krava (Forecast Consulting Advisor); Andi Cheney (Accounting).
Public Art in Context
Public Art Now guest curator Ebony Dumas sits down with artists Ashley Teamer and Monique Verdin to discuss their respective artworks, Tambourine Cypress and Nanih Bvlbancha, and the neighborhood, historical, and urban design context, both in Public Art Now.
Watch now and explore how these public artists consider context in their work and create spaces alongside community.
Featuring:
- Ashley Teamer‘s collages explore the relationships between the body, nature, space, and time. These themes are represented by original snapshots and found materials that are sewn and glued together. As a visual artist and DJ, she uses sound to creatively intervene with indoor and outdoor architecture, revealing the malleability of our built environment.
- Monique Verdin is an art maker, a wild gardener, story keeper, citizen of the Houma Nation and steward of the Land Memory Bank & Seed Exchange. Monique co-stewards Bvlbancha Liberation Radio, an urban earthwork Nanih Bvlbancha, and is a SwampNet collaborator – experimenting with autonomous and alternative communications that operate as both archives and emergency channels for community connections.
Moderated by Ebony Dumas, FORWARD Issue 8 Public Art Now guest curator and Director of Planning + Engagement at Forecast Public Art. Ebony is an urban and regional planner who enjoys building consensus among stakeholders for local and national projects in economic development, creative placemaking/keeping, and neighborhood planning.
How Art & Culture Builds Civic Health
A FORWARD series conversation exploring how art and culture are central tools advancing civic health in local communities around the country.
Watch and leave inspired by how initiatives from Philadelphia to rural Kentucky to Arkansas can be models for cross-sector practice to create a healthy democracy in your community.
Featuring:
- Lisa Hicks Gilbert, mayor, historian, community builder. Born and raised in Elaine, Arkansas, Lisa serves as the volunteer program manager at the Lee Street Community Center and as the founder and managing director of Descendants of the Elaine Massacre of 1919 (DOEM1919)—an organization dedicated to preserving the history and legacy of the 1919 Elaine Massacre.
- Phoebe Bachman, (she/they), a South Philadelphia–based artist, facilitator, and curator, whose interdisciplinary practice is grounded in collaboration and social justice.
- Savannah Barrett, exchange director for Art of the Rural, a national organization that works to resource rural and Native artists and culture bearers to build the field, change narratives, and bridge divides.
Moderated by Richard Young, FORWARD Issue 8: Civic Health guest editor and the founder and executive director at CivicLex, a nonprofit in Lexington, Kentucky, dedicated to strengthening civic health at the local level.
WORKSHOPS & TRAININGS
MAKING IT PUBLIC
Piloted in 2014, the Making It Public workshop was originally designed with the intention of equipping Minnesota artists with essential place-making tools for utilization in their own communities. Over the years the workshop curriculum has developed nationally to serve artists who are interested in exploring or expanding a public art-making practice as well as arts administrators who are interested in strengthening local practices to support, create, and promote public art opportunities.
The two individual workshops have been attended by hundreds of artists and arts administrators across the U.S. at the request of municipalities, state arts agencies, non-profit organizations, and private developers. The 5-week Zoom educational experience consists of 90-minute presentations covering practical and tactical subject matter including local and national arts industry guest panelists.
ADMINISTRATORS TRAINED IN 2025
ARTISTS TRAINED IN 2025
2025 Making It Public sessions
New Jersey Artists workshop
Provided for New Jersey-based artists in New Jersey; in partnership with The New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
Massachusetts Artists workshop
provided for Massachusetts-based artists; in partnership with the Metropolitan Area Planning Council and the New England Foundation for the Arts.
Louisiana Administrators workshop
Provided for Louisiana-based nonprofit arts organizations, nonprofits, public and private schools, school boards, colleges and universities, and local government agencies; in partnership with Louisiana Division of the Arts and Louisiana Percent for Art Program.
Forecast consulting partners Cándida González and Lauren Kennedy led these in-person and virtual workshops with local and national guest panelists.
Banner image: Forecast 2025 Mid-Career Project grantee Roger Cummings's innovative and dynamic Adinkra Canopy transforms a key intersection in North Minneapolis into a vibrant and engaging space, visible both day and night. The project features a series of cutout Adinkra symbols (visual emblems originating in West Africa that carry deep philosophical meanings about wisdom, resilience, unity, and justice). Fifty of these symbols are now suspended above the JXTA skate plaza, where they create a living archive of cultural memory in motion.. Photo courtesy the artist. Artist grant program featured project images: Photos courtesy the artists. Change Lab: Paula Castillo at the Rio Grande near Veguita, New Mexico; photo © Don Usner 2023. FORWARD: (Issue 8 Cover image) In 2024, NYC CEC used lively little yellow figures (and larger-than-life puppets) to raise awareness of participatory voting to change the way New Yorkers offer input on the city budget. Photo © The People’s Creative Institute, courtesy Yazmany Arboleda. Workshops and Trainings: 2019 Making It Public training held in Saint Paul, MN; photo by NeDahNess Rose Greene.