A Blade of Grass Names Three Fellows, $25K Each

May 20. A Blade of Grass posted the 2026 In Fellowship cohort to its site overnight. Three names, three projects, $25,000 apiece.

The New York-based nonprofit runs the program annually. Unrestricted funding, socially engaged art as the through-line. This year's cohort: Yara Said, working in Brooklyn on participatory sculpture that pulls from textile traditions and community oral history; Collective Breathing, a Los Angeles group building public interventions around air quality and environmental justice; and Jamie Sneider, a Detroit-based artist whose practice crosses performance, archival research, and neighborhood-scale installation.

The fellowship launched in 2025. No strings, no reporting requirements beyond a final project update. The structure is unusually clean for this kind of funding. Most arts grants layer in residency requirements, board presentations, quarterly check-ins. A Blade of Grass strips that back to the core question: what can an artist do with $25,000 and twelve months of breathing room.

Said's proposal centers on a series of woven structures built collaboratively in Crown Heights, each piece responding to a different neighborhood story. Collective Breathing is working on sensor-mapped public sculpture in Echo Park, where air quality data becomes the visual armature. Sneider's project is still close-hold, but the application referenced Detroit's east side and a timeline stretching back to 1967.

The program selects from an open-call pool. This year's applicant count was not released. The three fellows start work in July, with final presentations scheduled for spring 2027.

$25,000 is not transformative money, but it buys time. Time to not take the teaching gig, not split the studio rent three ways, not rush the proposal to fit someone else's timeline. The fellowship assumes the artist knows what to do with it. That assumption is rarer than the check.