New Inside Out Artist Conversation with Li Ning

Why does a person dance?

Li Ning’s answer is not about dreams, passion, or career planning.It is something harsher, and more real:

Sometimes, if you do not dance, you cannot go on living.

In this episode, we speak with Li Ning at length about the body, dance, fatherhood, injury, growing up, desire, death, and art.From a rural childhood in northern China, to the breakdance wave of the 1980s, to contemporary dance and live art, what he offers is not a story of success, but the story of how a person can be interrupted by life again and again, and how the body can keep bringing him back to himself.

Residencies, Workshops, & Fellowships

Center for Craft – 2026 Craft Archive FellowshipFour $5,000 awards will be offered to fellows conducting research on underrepresented craft histories. The fellowship will culminate with a featured article on Hyperallergic and a virtual program hosted by the Center for Craft. Read more on Hyperallergic.Deadline: May 20, 2026 | centerforcraft.org

Oak Spring Garden Foundation - Fellowship for Distinction in Fine Crafts and DesignThe fellowship will be awarded to an early-career craftsperson or designer whose work meaningfully engages with the natural world. It includes a $10,000 grant and a two- to five-week stay at OSGF in Northern Virginia.Deadline: May 31, 2026 | osgf.org

Provincetown Art Association and Museum - Robert Motherwell & Renate Ponsold FellowshipA one-year, low-residency program that supports scholars conducting original research on the visual art and artists of Outer Cape Cod. Deadline: June 1, 2026 | paam.org

Open Calls for Art & Writing

Some words describe feelings so precisely that entire paragraphs fail to compete.

Fernweh is one of them — a German word for the ache of distant places, the longing for somewhere you’ve never been. It is not ordinary wanderlust. It is deeper, quieter, almost spiritual: the feeling that your soul recognizes roads your body has never walked.

It lives in airport terminals, train stations, maps, foreign skylines, and late nights spent imagining another life somewhere else. It is the strange homesickness for the unknown.

Maybe Fernweh is not about escaping where you are.

Maybe it is the heart reminding you that you were made to keep expanding.

Where does your Fernweh point? 🌍

Hi Friends,

We wanted to share a few new pieces published on STRATUM this week. Each one moves in a different direction, but all of them bring real depth, care, and urgency in the way they think through art, history, politics, and lived experience. We hope you’ll spend some time with them.

Communitas: An Art Manifesto

https://www.elsehereglobal.com/post/communitas-an-art-manifesto

Fish Slapping, Dancing, Feminist Disability

https://www.elsehereglobal.com/post/fish-slapping-dancing-feminist-disability

April

Open Call: 2026 Inge Morath Award → 4/30

The Inge Morath Award is a grant given to a woman or nonbinary photographer under the age of 30 to support the completion of a long-term documentary project

May

Field of Future Fellowship → 5/1

Bard Graduate Center (BGC) is pleased to continue the Fields of the Future fellowship and mentorship program for Spring 2027 (February 15 - June 15, 2027) in partnership with Sylvester Manor, a historic district of national significance on the New York and National Registers of Historic Places.

Hi Friends, here's a opportunity for you to think about:

The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant

The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant supports emerging and established writers who write about contemporary visual art. Ranging from $15,000 to $50,000 in four categories—articles, books, short-form writing, and translation—the grants support projects addressing both general and specialized art audiences, from short reviews for magazines and newspapers to in-depth scholarly studies. The program also supports art writing that engages criticism through interdisciplinary methods and experiments with literary styles. As long as a writer meets the eligibility and publishing requirements, they can apply.

Hi Dear ELSEHERE Friends,

As summer gets closer, we wanted to share a quick update and also open the door a little wider.

Over the past week, we’ve published several new articles on STRATUM. Links are below if you’d like to spend time with them:

• When “Cute” Becomes a Boundary: Rabbits, Praise, and the Soft Discipline of Recognition

• Paper Cutting: Warmth of the World Beneath Blades and Scissors

• The Ambiguous Object

A ball has its own logic.

It moves. It repeats. It escapes. It rolls out of line. It refuses to stay still long enough to become only one thing. We are looking for artists, thinkers, movers, makers, and rule-breakers who want to work with the ball not only as object, but as force, symbol, memory, game, control system, absurdity, repetition, choreography, pressure, play, delay, or drift.

In many East Asian families, two things remain remarkably scarce.

One is the phrase “I’m sorry.” The other is tears.

They are not absent. They are simply swallowed. Tears are pushed back down the throat. Apologies are withheld before they can form. Over time, both harden into the same dull ache, a pressure that settles somewhere in the chest and stays there for years. It does not always announce itself dramatically. Most of the time, it lingers as something quieter and more difficult to name.

This is part of why family pain in East Asian contexts can be so difficult to describe. It is not always explosive. It is not always visible. It often leaves no single scene that can be cleanly pointed to as the source of injury. Instead, it accumulates through what is repeatedly denied, interrupted, or left unsaid. A feeling is dismissed. A cry is silenced. A…