Fine Arts’ Fellowship in Civic Engagement is a one (renewable to two) year position for an established artist who is active in collaborative, socially engaged practices that seek to address the social and political realities of communities. The Fellowship fosters interdisciplinary collaboration across the institute and forges relationships with external communities and organizations. In addition to teaching responsibilities in the Fine Arts Department, the fellow will develop programming and/or workshops connecting their practice to internal and external communities.
“I see so many more people coming into art school who, when you ask them what they want from their engagement with creativity, say they want to make change. One way Pratt Fine Arts is addressing this desire is by emphasizing civic engagement through a network of socially engaged practitioners, artists who have the flexibility to navigate ambiguous spaces and re-imagine the structures we live in. The other fundamental reason to have this kind of practice and this kind of practitioner come into an academic setting is to get something in motion but then to follow wherever that motion leads, emboldening artists to alchemize the strengths of the institution in support of the broader community while simultaneously modeling an inspirational way forward for the community at Pratt.”
– Jane South, Chairperson of Fine Arts
This Fellowship is a full-time appointment in support of our ongoing commitment to an equitable and inclusive learning environment. The selected Fellow will foster interdisciplinary collaboration across the institute and forge relationships with external communities and organizations. In addition to teaching responsibilities in the Fine Arts Department, the selected fellow will develop programming and/or workshops connecting their practice to both internal and surrounding publics. This year, established artists who are active in cross-disciplinary, collaborative, socially engaged practices that seek to address environmental justice and climate crisis are encouraged to apply. We welcome applications from a diversity of practices.
Civic Engagement Fellow 2026-27: Kamau Amu Patton
Kamau Amu Patton is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. Patton’s work engages archives, documents, networks and sites. Patton’s practice is a charting of language, movement, thought, speech and actions, which aims to develop structures to archive histories of community building through an investigation of stories and strategies of placemaking. Patton’s project, Afterlife Geographies, documents “way of life” practices in relation to processes of settlement and the development of sites through which communities articulate worldview, synthesize experience, and establish infrastructures of empowerment and remembrance. In September 2017, Patton installed an iteration of his ongoing project, Tel, at the Tang Museum. In 2019, Patton’s public art commission with the Bowman Montessori School in Palo Alto, CA, was open to the public. Patton is a 2020 Creative Capital Grant Awardee. In 2020 Patton was an artist in residence at Coaxial Arts Foundation in Los Angeles and he was a 2020 Archive Artist in Residence at Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago. Utilizing recordings from the Sun Ra / El Saturn Collection, Patton created The Past & Other Dreams, a double cassette produced by the artist in collaboration with the Creative Audio Archive at ESS. A box set LP of Paton’s arrangements of Terry Adkins’s Lone Wolf Recital Corps Recitals, Second Mind | Alto Age, was released in partnership with the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in 2021. In 2022 Patton performed new sound compositions at Roulette Intermedium and Basilica Arts in Hudson New York. In October of 2022, Patton presented a solo exhibition at the Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery at San Jose State University. In June 2023 Patton presented a new inter-media performance, Dromeostasis as part of the Signals exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In 2024 Patton performed new sound compositions as part of the exhibition Flight Into Egypt, Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876- Now at Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
