incubation award

Idle Hands invites emerging and mid-career artists based in New York City (all five boroughs eligible) to apply for the Idle Hands Incubation Award, offering a $10,000 unrestricted stipend, professional mentorship, and a culminating exhibition in our Williamsburg, Brooklyn loft space.

Time- Based Media Artists residing and working in NYC 

Theme: Rooting

For this award cycle, Rooting is approached through the lens of time-based media, including film, video, sound, performance, and other durational practices.

Rooting is an ongoing and active process of connection: to people, places, rituals, histories, communities, and systems of care. Within time-based practices, artists are uniquely positioned to explore the long-term structural complexities of relationships, and the integrality of dynamic forces both fertile and fallow in giving meaning to the spaces, connections, and practices that guide how and where we root—a site we might call home. Places, communities, memories, languages, traditions, sets of relationships: we welcome all of these, and more, as an interlocking understanding of home. Yet the processes of growth and recognition that may lead us out of the dark and towards a more loving and compassionate way of living are not easy. Spreading roots does not mean simply unchecked expansion and communication; it also entails divergence, obstruction, entanglement, and decay. We’re interested in work that fully considers the conditions under which we seek, and find, belonging.

Artists may engage with, but are not limited to, exploring the theme through:

• Place, geography, and environments that shape identity and experience

• Community, kinship, chosen family, and collective care

• Ritual, repetition, and everyday practices of belonging

• Memory, inheritance, ancestry, and cultural transmission

• Migration, displacement, return, and questions of home

• Cycles of growth, decay, adaptation, and renewal

• Interspecies collaboration and communication

• Visible and invisible networked systems

• Acts of tending, cultivation and collective responsibility

• Systems as models for resilience, interdependence, and exchange

Conceptual, speculative, abstract, and formally experimental approaches are welcome. We encourage proposals that examine how connection is formed, sustained, challenged, or reimagined, and how acts of rooting can create the conditions for individual and collective flourishing.

Timeline:

• Award Period: September 8- December 13, 2026

• Exhibition / Public Presentation: December 11-13, 2026