Community Engagement Art
This category uses art to create community dialog or engage residents with art and each other. The art is a mechanism to inspire, invoke and evoke dialog, inspire change or understanding, educate and bring unity to communities. The artwork should address something the community cares about, create dialog and/or activities toward solutions, and establish or embolden relationships that improve the community’s quality of life, inclusion, place identity and/or preservation. Examples of community engagement art include murals and public artworks where the piece or process inspired change or raised quality-of-life standards or where theater/plays were performed using original scripts produced in public collaboration that created community dialog and conversation.  

Criteria: 

• Community engagement art should include facts; informational, factfinding or educational material.  
• The work must include aspects of public engagement, including but not limited to survey, community dialog, listening sessions and presentations of history, fact, community issues, etc. 
• The community engagement category requires that the exhibition/experience/body being presented for a Fellowship was free and open to the public and was held in an accessible way for all Arkansans. 
• The Fellowship requires that the submitted works were on display or accessible for at least one day. 
• The exhibition/experience could have been presented virtually, indoors or outdoors. 
  

Contemporary Craft
This category focuses on nonfunctional crafts created by using traditional and/or historical methods or materials and using modern and contemporary aesthetics or concepts. This category includes using traditional folk arts methods. The creations should be “art of today” in the truest sense in that the work today with Arkansas heritage and past through the mechanism and lens of traditional arts and crafts. Contemporary craft does not have to be functional, but it traces its history back to traditions rooted in functionality. Traditional crafts, such as quilting, is then used to create a contemporary work emblematic of what Arkansans experience today. Examples of contemporary craft include creating quilts made from scraps from evicted renters; exploring the intersection of arts and place through crochet; and using metalworking molds to create larger-than-life portraits of modern Arkansans. 

Criteria: 

• For the 2022 award, the contemporary art or craft must include fiber art, which includes but is not limited to textile, thread, embroidery, yarn and fabric. Material may be natural or synthetic fibers. 
• The contemporary craft must focus on visual aspects and be a visual piece. 
• The work must focus and use fiber materials and highlight manual labor or skill involved in creating the piece.  
• Priority is placed on visual aesthetics over utilization/utility. 

Traditional Categories: 

Performance Art: Mississippi Delta Blues Contemporary Songwriting or Score 
This category seeks to recognize the compositions of Arkansas musician-songwriters who create in the blues genre. Historically, Arkansas was a hotbed for blues musicians and helped develop a style of music specific to the Mississippi Delta. This Fellowship category will highlight the current blues talent in our state. 

Visual Arts: Graphic Novel or Narrative  
This category seeks to recognize the artform of graphic novels or narrative, which include visual storytelling, manga, extended comic strips, traditional graphic novels, comics and heavy-visual roleplaying books. The graphic novel or narrative work may be fiction, creative nonfiction or nonfiction. Artwork must be original to the artist. This category will focus on the quality of the art and its ability to successfully tell a story visually.  

Literary Arts: Flash fiction or flash creative nonfiction 
In this category, the Arkansas Arts Council seeks to recognize writers whose work falls between 500 and 1,000 words and uses literary fiction techniques in either a fiction or nonfiction format. The work can be fiction or creative nonfiction but should contain all elements of a good story. Flash fiction is the telling of a story that is not true but is told in a truthful way or in a way that evokes the truth of something larger and encourages readers to think. Creative nonfiction is a true story told by including fiction techniques, such as allusion, alliteration, allegory, figurative language and blurred-time sequences. A panel will review three pieces of submitted writing per entry to recognize writers whose work is revealing, dramatic, provocative, engaging and concise. We are looking for top stories told in new, inventive and short ways. Submitted work ​may be published or unpublished. 

Creatives who earn Fellowship awards will be honored during a reception in October 2022.  

Photo: 2019 Individual Artist Fellowship recipients: (back) Holly Laws, sculpture or installation art; John Vanderslice, writing of novels; Matthew Boyce, dance choreography; Tyrone Jaeger, writing of novels; (front) Monica Clark-Robinson, writing of novels; Greely Myatt, sculpture or installation art; Robin Neveu Brown, dance choreography. Not pictured are: Paiyin Lin-Mros, dance choreography, and Linda Nguyen Lopez, sculpture or installation art.