Provincetown Gets a New Residency for Native Artists, Starting Next Spring

The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a seaside town at the tip of Cape Cod, will host one Native artist for four weeks next spring. The stay runs from May 23 to June 19, and it is the first year of the Walker Youngbird Native Artist Residency, a program the center is launching with the Walker Youngbird Foundation, according to ARTnews.

A residency is a set period in which an artist lives and works in one place, away from everyday routines. The foundation is putting up $10,000 for the program's first year. Of that, $2,500 goes to the artist as a stipend, a fixed payment to help cover living costs.

The selected artist will have a private apartment and a 400-square-foot studio, roughly 37 square metres, for the length of the stay. The artist will also join the center's creative community and take part in a closing public program.

Reid Walker, who founded the Walker Youngbird Foundation, and Sharon Polli, the center's executive director, gave statements to ARTnews in interviews. The foundation is a Native-led nonprofit, meaning an organisation run by Native people that works for public benefit rather than profit.

The Fine Arts Work Center was founded in 1968 by a group of artists that included Robert Motherwell. Its purpose was to give artists and writers time and space to focus on their work without pressure to produce. In 2024, the Motherwell estate gave $200,000 to the center to support its fellowship program, its summer workshops and its residencies, ARTnews reported.

The Walker Youngbird Foundation has backed other Native artists this year. Earlier in 2026, it funded Native Neon, a residency in which a Native artist makes a neon work, the glass tube lighting used in signs and art. That program was developed with Lite Brite Neon Studio in Kingston, New York. It offered $50,000 for production, travel and lodging, plus a $10,000 stipend, and it supports Indigenous artists who are new to neon.

In July, the foundation's grant program also made news. Paiute painter Melissa Melero-Moose won a $15,000 Native arts grant from the foundation for work made from willow and pine nuts. The grant supports a new body of work that will be shown to the public in the fall, according to a press release from the artist's grant announcement.

The foundation offers several grant programs through the year to support Indigenous artists. The Provincetown residency adds a stay on the East Coast, in a town with a long history of artists working side by side, to that list.