CENTER – it is a noun and a verb. It is an action and a destination.
Founded in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1994, the 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization CENTER supports socially and environmentally engaged lens-based projects through education, public platforms, funding, and partnerships.
Image-making holds a unique power to confront audiences with uncomfortable truths, advance cultural understandings, and promote social justice. Through our advancement of artists and their work, CENTER serves to deepen public understanding of lens-based media’s complex history and ongoing cultural significance. By establishing trans-disciplinary partnerships between artists and justice-driven communities, historians, cultural critics, students, and the art world, we honor our unique role in advancing projects that respect all people, open minds, and engage our shared humanity.
Characterized by a community of gifted and committed photographers, CENTER has proven for the last 29 years that it can help photographers and lens-based artists grow into their full potential. CENTER programs foster insights and actualizations that ripple and impact all involved by providing platforms where the creative impulse can be engaged and challenged.
ANNUAL PROGRAMS | Includes the Project Launch Grant, Project Development Grant, Me&Eve Grant, the three CENTER Awards: Personal, Social and Environmental, the Excellence in Multimedia Storytelling Award, Santa Fe Fellowship, Callanan Excellence in Teaching Award, and the Review Santa Fe Photo Symposium. Public exhibitions, educational presentations, and expositions of the work are held in conjunction with the awards, grants, and Review Santa Fe. These programs are open for submission to international and national photographers and lens-based artists during our annual Calls for Entry.
LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT | We acknowledge that Santa Fe, New Mexico, is located in the ancestral and unceded traditional territories of the Tewa people, who continue to maintain connections to this land. Thousands of years ago, O’ghe P’oghe – the original Tewa name for Santa Fe, which means White Shell, Water Place – was a center place for Northern and Southern Tewa communities. We honor the Tewa people of the past, present, and future who inhabited, held sacred, and stewarded this land.
SUPPORTERS
CENTER programs are generously supported by: The Gumbo Foundation, the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, the City of Santa Fe Arts & Culture Department, New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New Mexico Humanities Council, our special friends, donors, Members, Board of Directors, and staff who help us to fulfill our mission.
