Wave Pool, the Camp Washington-based nonprofit art and community center, is preparing to consider applicants for its 2027 Incubator Fellowship. The six-month fellowship is open to any local artist or collective, but is particularly interested in those with big, community-focused programs in mind.
“The Wave Pool Incubator supports artists at the most formative and precarious stage of ambitious, long-term initiatives, when ideas need room to take shape,” Wave Pool wrote in their press release. They encourage applicants to develop and pitch ideas that would bring avenues for intercommunal collaboration, on-going investment and impact, and structural innovation to the Queen City.
The three 2026 Incubator fellows were local artists Erika NJ Allen, Matt Whitby, and Bethany Pelle. Their fellowships began in April 2026.
Allen’s Incubator Fellowship resulted in Clay Church, a community ceramics studio located in Camp Washington that offers private lessons and small workshops for those already familiar with ceramic arts to grow their craft. Whitby’s fellowship similarly created space for artists, this time in the form of a rent-subsidized nine-studio co-op in a converted warehouse in Lower Price Hill. Pelle used the fellowship period to create Kyndred Klay, an accessible and adaptive ceramics studio across the river in Newport’s East Row Historic District.
Boris Oicherman, Wave Pool’s executive director, hopes that the newest crop of Incubator fellows will embrace similar types of socially-engaged, infrastructural, and long-term art enterprises. “If you want to establish something that will run for many, many years — and maybe outlive even yourself — this is the fellowship for you,” Oicherman told CityBeat.
Fellows will receive a $4,000 stipend, an additional $1,500 project budget, as well as admission to Wave Pool’s creative studios and workshops, non-profit mentorship from Wave Pool’s staff, and fiscal sponsorship for grants and donations up to three years after the fellowship’s completion.
In turn, fellows are expected to attend biweekly meetings with their cohort, document the process of their initiative or program building, compile a final report on the project and its future outlook, and publicly present the completed work at the end of the six months.
“If you establish something like a non-profit as your artwork, you have a completely different set of challenges,” Oicherman explained. “Incubator is a program for specifically this kind of artist.” Moving forward, Oicherman said Wave Pool hopes to have two Incubator fellowships a year, each with a cohort of three to four artists.
Round one applications are being accepted until Sunday, Nov. 1, 2026. Fellowships are set to begin Jan. 4, 2027, and run until early July. To find out more, visit Wave Pool’s website.